NetApp & Google Cloud enhance AI capabilities with update

NetApp and Google Cloud have announced enhancements to Google Cloud NetApp Volumes aimed at improving performance and reducing complexity for large-scale cloud storage workloads.

Organisations can now anticipate easier scaling of high-performance enterprise applications and databases thanks to the new capabilities provided by Google Cloud NetApp Volumes. The offerings include enhancements to support petabyte-scale workloads such as electronic design automation, AI applications, and content data repositories.

The collaboration between NetApp and Google Cloud intends to empower businesses to capitalise on AI, thereby enabling greater agility and large-scale innovation. "For many organisations, the cloud is the fastest and simplest path to using AI to uncover data-driven insights," said Pravjit Tiwana, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Cloud Storage at NetApp. He added, "Our collaboration with Google Cloud is accelerating generative AI data pipelines by seamlessly integrating the latest AI innovations with the robust data management capabilities of NetApp ONTAP. The new capabilities of NetApp Volumes help customers scale their cloud storage to meet the demands of the modern, high-performance applications and datasets that drive meaningful business outcomes."

The announced capabilities include direct integration with Google Cloud's machine learning platform Vertex AI. This integration enables customers to utilise their data in NetApp Volumes directly within the Vertex AI platform, facilitating the building of custom agents without independently managing data pipelines for retrieval augmented generation applications.

For those leveraging premium and extreme service levels, performance enhancements are now accessible in all 14 regions where these levels are available. These enhancements allow customers to provision single volumes beginning at 15TiB that can be scaled up to 1PiB with up to 30 GiB/s of throughput.

Additionally, improvements for the Flex service level permit independent scaling of capacity and performance. Customers can preview this feature to avoid overprovisioning, selecting specific throughput and IOPS capabilities while scaling throughput up to 5 GiB/s and IOPS up to 160K.

Google Cloud Assured Workloads Onboarding will also be supported soon by NetApp Volumes. Customers using this will comply with data residency, cloud key management, and transparent access control requirements specific to their regions.

Sameet Agarwal, Vice President and General Manager, Google's Cloud Storage, commented, "Simplified access to AI is a democratising force enabling organisations to leverage their most critical asset—data—for a competitive edge. Organisations can leverage their NetApp ONTAP on-premises data and hybrid cloud environments. By combining the capabilities of Google Cloud's Vertex AI platform with Google Cloud NetApp Volumes, we're delivering a powerful solution to help customers accelerate digital transformation and position themselves for long-term success."

These new capabilities form part of the broader go-to-market strategy between Google Cloud and partners like NetApp, aiming to facilitate AI scalability within the enterprise sector.