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.
“Data is becoming the constraint to productively scale AI,” Kurian said. He cited NetApp’s view that 93% of organizations report at least one data challenge blocking their AI ambitions.
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.
This instant news alert was generated by narrative science technology and financial data from MarketBeat in order to provide readers with the fastest reporting and unbiased coverage. Please send any questions or comments about this story to contact@marketbeat.com.
Before you consider NetApp, you'll want to hear this.
MarketBeat keeps track of Wall Street's top-rated and best performing research analysts and the stocks they recommend to their clients on a daily basis. MarketBeat has identified the five stocks that top analysts are quietly whispering to their clients to buy now before the broader market catches on... and NetApp wasn't on the list.
While NetApp currently has a Hold rating among analysts, top-rated analysts believe these five stocks are better buys.
View The Five Stocks Here
A strong long-term portfolio starts with companies that can survive recessions, inflation, changing consumer habits, and shifting market leadership.
This report names seven blue-chip stocks across technology, retail, consumer staples, healthcare, networking, sporting goods, and utilities that offer investors a mix of stability, income, growth, and staying power.
Get This Free Report
Continue following MarketBeat
Add MarketBeat as your preferred source on Google to see our latest stories in your feed.
