SAN JOSE, California – NetApp used its GTC slot to showcase infrastructure offerings aimed at boosting enterprise AI efforts.

Among its offerings on display in sunny San Jose was NetApp AI Data Engine (AIDE). The platform is co-engineered with Nvidia and acts as an AI data platform stack, enabling enterprises to overcome data challenges that bottleneck AI projects.

Included as part of AIDE is a continuously updated global metadata catalog with search capabilities so businesses can gain better insights into the minute details of their data. Semantic enrichment capabilities look to push beyond standard file system metadata, instead analyzing file content to semantically enrich metadata in place.

AIDE is set to launch later this month and is scheduled to gain additional proficiencies, including expansive hybrid cloud support to bring AIDE offerings regardless of where enterprise data lives, with multimodal data capabilities also in the works. The vendor said new features will drop at an unspecified point “this summer.”

“Despite massive investments and market pressures to leverage AI for improved productivity and enhanced business decision making, data challenges are bottlenecking projects before they even reach production," Syam Nair, chief product officer at NetApp, explained. “To take back control of their data, customers need a mature enterprise-grade data platform that was designed disaggregated and intelligent from the beginning so that storage, services, and control scale independently without lock-in.”

New EF-Series storage arrays

On the flip side, the San Jose-based vendor also unveiled the next generation of its EF-Series storage systems.

The EF50 and EF80 were debuted at GTC, with NetApp touting them as capable of providing more than 110 Gb/s of read throughput and 55 Gb/s of write throughput – an apparent 250% improvement on prior generations.

With 1.5 petabytes (PB) of storage in a two-rack unit (2RU) configuration, NetApp said the new arrays will help both enterprise and neoclouds “meet the growing demands of AI, high-performance computing (HPC), and transactional databases.”

“As businesses contend with ever-increasing data volumes and performance-intensive applications such as AI model training, AI inferencing, and high-performance computing, they need infrastructure that delivers speed, scalability, and efficiency without added complexity,” Sandeep Singh, NetApp’s SVP and GM of enterprise storage, explained. “With the new EF-Series systems, purpose-built for extreme performance, we’re enabling customers to deploy and scale high-throughput, low-latency workloads quickly and efficiently, while reducing data center footprint and operational overhead.”