NTAP News & Events

NetApp (NTAP) and Cisco (CSCO) announced that they have collaborated to offer new validated solutions for secure, scalable, and simplified AI. Expanding the proven success of FlexPod, the new solutions provide a simple, reliable path for enterprises to address the specific challenges AI workloads place on compute, network, and storage infrastructure. NetApp and Cisco are expanding FlexPod to support AI adoption across different organizational sizes and maturity levels, using pre-tested, validated architectures and enterprise-grade data management as a consistent foundation. These solutions support use cases such as: Enterprise AI Deployments: Enterprises can simply and quickly deploy high-performance infrastructure for AI use cases including retrieval-augmented generation and semantic search using this validated architecture. FlexPod reduces integration complexity while allowing AI capabilities to run directly where the data resides, with built-in, end-to-end security. This architecture includes disaggregated storage for independent scaling of performance and capacity with NetApp AFX; future functionality of data discovery, preparation and governance capabilities from NetApp AI Data Engine which integrates the NVIDIA AI Data Platform reference design; and distributed security and Zero Trust-aligned controls across the AI pipeline for AI-specific risks from Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA. Underpinning the Secure AI Factory, Cisco AI networking infrastructure with Nexus One transforms the network into a deterministic, high-performance fabric to maximize XPU utilization, reduce job completion times, and deliver predictable AI outcomes at scale. Targeting full-stack enterprise AI use cases, NetApp and Cisco have collaborated with NVIDIA to build FlexPod Solutions based on NVIDIA Enterprise Reference Architectures, enabling organizations to design, deploy, and scale high-performance AI factories. AI Inferencing and RAG Workflows: To enable teams and departments to tap into the benefits of AI with their existing data, this simplified, pre-integrated solution is designed to lower the cost, complexity, and specialized skill requirements associated with deploying AI infrastructure. Edge Computing: This solution enables enterprises to support AI inferencing, containerized, and virtualized workloads at the edge while maintaining low latency and operational consistency. By extending proven FlexPod architecture to remote and edge locations, customers benefit from faster time to value and reduced operational complexity compared to bespoke infrastructure or isolated IT stacks at each site. Combining Cisco Unified Edge with flexible NetApp storage options delivers a flexible, validated converged solution. Centralized fleet management, policy-based configuration, and automated orchestration enable repeatable deployments and simplified operations across highly distributed environments.

NetApp (NTAP) and Cisco (CSCO) announced an expansion of their collaboration to help customers strengthen defense-in-depth strategies for customers. Combining Intelligent Data Infrastructure with advanced analytics and observability capabilities, NetApp and Splunk have delivered deep, real-time visibility into storage and infrastructure health. Together, they are helping customers turn operational data into actionable insights that improve reliability, security, and business outcomes. By expanding their collaboration with the new NetApp Splunk Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response playbook, NetApp and Splunk are helping joint customers contain ransomware attacks and limit data loss at the storage layer, enhancing the containment of the blast radius of cyberattacks while increasing the speed and reducing the cost of recovery. To give customers the resiliency and flexibility they need to protect their data, Cisco and NetApp are releasing the NetApp Splunk SOAR playbook. Splunk Enterprise Security is already integrated with NetApp Ransomware Resilience to collect analytics from the data layer, enhancing incident triage and prioritization. With the new playbook, Splunk SOAR users can now use those signals as well as signals from other solutions to automatically take incident response actions directly on NetApp ONTAP storage as an integral part of their incident response. These actions include blocking a suspicious user, taking snapshots of the data and taking data volumes offline to protect against further infection. As a result, customers will be better able to contain ransomware attacks and limit data loss at the storage layer. Utilized as part of the organization's defense in depth security strategy, the NetApp Splunk SOAR playbooks help to strengthen collaboration between security and storage teams.