NetApp has expanded its portfolio of data and storage services for data-intensive workloads. These are primarily services that users can acquire through the public cloud environments of AWS and Microsoft Azure.
NetApp is keen to offer its customers an “intelligent data infrastructure” for running data-intensive workloads, in a general sense focused on GenAI but also within specific applications such as VMware. Newly introduced services for this purpose should reduce customers’ resource requirements and risks. Especially within complex hybrid multicloud environments.
The newly announced services are aimed at giving customers back control of their data and strategic workloads. This using unified data storage, integrated data services and automated cloud operations.
Primarily for AWS
The new services focus on the large hyperscale environments of AWS and Microsoft Azure. For AWS, NetApp is announcing three solutions. NetApp BlueXP Workload Factory, Amazon Bedrock with Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP Reference Architecture and enhancements to Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP.
NetApp BlueXP Workload Factory for AWS is an intelligent data infrastructure service that uses defined industry best practices to automate planning, provisioning and managing cloud resources and services for key workloads. These include GenAI, VMware environments and enterprise databases.
Among other things, the service should optimize deployment time, cost, performance and resource protection for strategic workloads and associated data. In addition, NetApp BlueXP Workload Factory helps simplify workload migrations to the cloud by profiling infrastructure requirements for target workloads and comparing different resource options for cost and performance needs.
Further, this new NetApp service delivers these selected resources, moves existing workload data to the new cloud environments and continuously optimizes the entire environment for cost savings and performance targets.
The new NetApp AWS service Amazon Bedrock with Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP Reference Architecture provides a common reference architecture free for supporting customers to implement RAG workflows that bring proprietary data stored on Amazon FSx for ONTAP into their GenAI data pipelines.
The reference architecture helps developers use APIs for Amazon Bedrock to connect to Amazon FSx for ONTAP data stores. This allows them to securely use proprietary data and choose from powerful customizable pre-trained models (FMs) for new capabilities.
The latest AWS-focused new service is actually enhancements to Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP. For this, AWS has announced a new generation of Amazon FSx for ONTAP cloud storage service. Among other things, this new version offers new features to increase scalability and flexibility. In addition, this version offers up to 6 Gbps of throughput for a single high-availability (HA) pair of 512 TiB SSD storage.
For large-scale, high-performance workloads like GenAI, the second-generation Amazon FSx for ONTAP systems support dynamic scalability by adding HA pairs as needed, up to 24 nodes. This delivers up to 72 Gbps of throughput from 1 PiB of SSD storage. This should provide more flexibility and performance for changing business needs, NetApp said.
Also for Azure
Not only are there new solutions for AWS, NetApp is also coming out with a new cloud-focused service for Azure. NetApp GenAI Toolkit – Microsoft Azure NetApp Files allows customers to integrate enterprise data stored in Azure NetApp Files into their RAG workflows in a secure and programmable way. As a result, they can then more easily combine proprietary data with FMs for their GenAI projects.
Expansion of BlueXP Disaster Recovery
Finally, the new portfolio of services also includes NetApp BlueXP Disaster Recovery support for VMFS. The existing BlueXP Disaster Recovery service provides managed workflows for designing and executing automated disaster recovery plans for VMware workloads. This works in both on-prem and cloud environments. The service, according to the data and storage specialist, has now been expanded to include support for VMFS datastores for on-prem to on-prem disaster recovery.
Also read: NetApp refreshes high-end AFF A-Series: all-flash for AI