Harnessing AI - A NetApp perspective

Harnessing AI: A NetApp Perspective

In today’s digital age, artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming businesses across industries, and organizations are increasingly adopting AI solutions to stay ahead of the competition. At NetApp, we take pride in our heritage of developing innovative solutions that address the challenges of storing, managing, and protecting data in complex IT environments. Our dedication to AI is an extension of this heritage, and we’re excited to be at the forefront of this transformative journey.

The Potential of AI

Generative AI (genAI) is the new kid on the block, and it has the potential to reshape industries, revolutionize how businesses operate, and enhance our lives. With the right tools, individuals can unleash their creativity, and marketing professionals can use genAI to create high-quality video content from simple text. AI-powered music enables artists to craft full audio tracks from prompts like genre, lyrics, or inspirational artists. The applications of AI are vast, diverse, and still growing.

However, AI projects need an intelligent data infrastructure to succeed. In the recent Scaling AI Initiatives Responsibly survey, commissioned by NetApp, IDC identified the top reasons for AI initiatives failing, including the inability to access data, insufficient data to train models, privacy, compliance, and data governance concerns or requirements, data engineering complexity, and untrustworthy or poor-quality data sources.

NetApp’s Intelligent Data Infrastructure

At NetApp, we tackle these challenges head-on with an intelligent data infrastructure that gives you the ability to access any data from any location, maintaining data security, protection, and governance. Our adaptive operations aim to maximize the performance and efficiency of both infrastructure and applications while focusing on cost-effectiveness and sustainability. Together, these capabilities can enhance the productivity of AI workers and help you achieve more successful outcomes for your business.

We understand that AI isn’t just about algorithms and models; it’s about trust, transparency, and ethical use of data. We’re committed to helping you build responsible AI systems that prioritize accountability and privacy. With our data governance and compliance capabilities, your AI initiatives can adhere to regulatory requirements and ethical standards, building stakeholder trust and confidence.

NetApp’s classification service automatically tags data to support streamlined data cleansing for both the ingest and inferencing phases of the data pipeline, so the right data is used for queries, and sensitive data is not exposed to the model out of policy. Furthermore, NetApp offers revolutionary cyber-resilience capabilities, including AI/ML embedded in storage to combat ransomware. With our systems, you can detect and mitigate sophisticated cyber threats with increased accuracy and performance.

Our Python library of tools makes it easy for developers, data scientists, and data engineers to manage data. For example, teams can create an auditable NetApp SnapshotTM copy of a development workspace for traceability and error detection, or make relevant data instantly available for different queries without affecting production.

Partnership and Innovation

However, our dedication to AI extends beyond technology. We believe in the power of partnership to drive innovation and accelerate AI adoption across industries. We collaborate closely with industry leaders like NVIDIA and Google to co-create AI solutions that tackle real-world challenges and deliver tangible business value. For instance, with our genAI toolkit for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) operations, you can implement RAG operations by connecting proprietary data stored on NetApp volumes with Google’s Vertex AI for faster access to unique insights.

Conclusion

The potential of AI is limitless, and at NetApp, we’re excited to be at the forefront of this transformative journey. By combining our intelligent data management expertise with the power of AI, we empower organizations to unlock new possibilities, drive growth, and shape a better, more intelligent future for all. To explore further, visit our NetApp AI Solutions page.

Read more about NetApp AI thought leadership perspectives here.

Read about improving NetApp engineering with GenAI here.

If you missed out on our webinar where we talked through the survey results of IDC’s AI maturity model white paper, you can watch it here.