NetApp (NASDAQ:NTAP) used its INSIGHT 2026 event to outline a strategy for helping enterprises prepare data infrastructure for agentic AI, announcing expanded cloud partnerships, enhancements to its AI Data Engine and management platform, and a new high-scale storage architecture called NetApp Novus.
George Kurian said organizations seeking to move AI projects from pilot programs into production face two core issues: infrastructure constraints and difficulty harnessing fragmented enterprise data. He said AI systems require increasingly large GPU clusters and datasets, while unstructured information remains dispersed across storage systems, clouds, remote offices and sovereignty jurisdictions.
AI Data Engine expands beyond NetApp data
Syam Nair, NetApp’s Chief Product Officer, said the company’s platform is intended to provide AI-ready data, proactive protection, unified storage and complete control across hybrid environments. He said the goal is to activate data where it resides rather than require customers to copy or migrate it.
Nair announced that the metadata capability of the NetApp AI Data Engine will support heterogeneous data sources, extending beyond NetApp-managed data. The software-defined capability is designed to discover, understand and activate data across an enterprise estate without moving it into another system, according to Nair.
NetApp said it will make the AI Data Engine and its new metadata capability available free for the first six months. Nair said the platform is intended to surface data patterns and context while applying governance and protection policies.
The company also highlighted its acquisition of DataPelago. Nair said DataPelago is designed to accelerate existing tools used by researchers and data teams, including Spark, Trino and Python libraries, within the data infrastructure and without code changes.
Security, recovery and hybrid management
Nair said NetApp is pursuing what it calls “zero trust data security,” with protection built into data rather than centered solely on network posture or identity checks. He said AI readiness and data protection must operate together because autonomous agents could act on compromised information at machine speed.
NetApp also described expanded integration with Commvault. According to Nair, potential ransomware attacks will be surfaced within the Commvault interface, while NetApp’s SnapRestore and curated clean recovery capabilities will support recovery workflows.
For hybrid infrastructure management, the company introduced the NetApp Console, which Nair described as a control plane for on-premises systems, Keystone and major public clouds. The console includes AI-assisted operations intended to predict issues, resolve incidents and optimize capacity and costs with human oversight.
NetApp said the console can also operate in local, air-gapped environments. Nair said existing Active IQ Unified Manager customers will have an upgrade path rather than need to replace their management tooling.
The company additionally unveiled Keystone Sovereign, an add-on entitlement for Keystone subscriptions aimed at European Economic Area customers with regional compliance and data-residency requirements. Nair said the offering will be available in early November for France and Germany, followed by broader availability later.
Cloud partnerships expand
Mahesh Thiagarajan, executive vice president of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure at Oracle, said Oracle and NetApp are partnering to bring ONTAP to OCI. He said OCI File Storage and NetApp ONTAP will soon enable customers to run business-critical file-storage workloads in OCI using ONTAP tools, APIs and automation.
Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, said Google Cloud NetApp Volumes supports enterprise workloads, agentic workloads and retrieval-augmented generation inferencing. He also said NetApp storage solutions are now embedded natively in Google Distributed Cloud, supporting air-gapped sovereign environments for Google AI models.
Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of Microsoft Cloud, said Microsoft and NetApp continue to help customers bring ONTAP workloads to Azure and run demanding workloads through Azure NetApp Files.
NetApp introduces Novus for AI factories
The event’s largest announcement was NetApp Novus, a new disaggregated architecture intended for accelerated computing environments, large AI factories and GPU clusters exceeding 100,000 GPUs.
Kurian said Novus is designed to independently scale storage components and assimilate data across tens of thousands of systems into a single namespace. NetApp said the architecture is designed to deliver up to 100 TB per second of performance and a zettabyte-scale file system, claims the company characterized as first-of-their-kind capabilities.
Arindam Banerjee, NetApp’s Chief Platform and Technology Officer, said Novus uses federation to combine multiple storage clusters into one namespace, with throughput increasing as clusters are added. The architecture uses standard pNFS and Flex Files protocols, he said, allowing use of the stock Linux kernel rather than requiring a proprietary client or kernel module.
Banerjee said Novus separates metadata services into independently scalable protocol, state and catalog planes, addressing metadata bottlenecks that can arise when AI workloads combine high-volume data reads and writes with extensive metadata operations. Novus data servers will run ONTAP, he added, extending NetApp’s existing data integrity, resilience, security, isolation and quality-of-service capabilities to the new architecture.
Kurian said the announcements reflect NetApp’s effort to help customers build intelligent data infrastructure that can transform enterprise data into usable knowledge for AI systems and agents.
About NetApp (NASDAQ:NTAP)
NetApp, Inc develops intelligent data infrastructure and data management solutions for enterprises, service providers, and government organizations. The company helps customers store, manage, protect, and access data across on-premises environments, private clouds, public clouds, and hybrid multicloud infrastructures.
Its portfolio includes enterprise storage systems, all-flash arrays, cloud-connected storage, object storage, and data management software. NetApp’s offerings include the ONTAP data management operating system, AFF and ASA storage systems, StorageGRID object storage, and BlueXP, a platform designed to help customers manage data and storage resources across multiple environments.
