NetApp Insight 2025 - Day 1 Recap

Ok, so Mario doesn’t kick the party off EXACTLY like this, buuut…

I might have just a little bit of FOMO at not being able to attend NetApp Insight this year.

NetApp’s resurgence over the last two years (source: the NTAP ticker) has been a result a focus on the fundamentals - a hardware based, enterprise focus that solidified their presence in the on-prem data center.

Here’s my lightning-fast review of everything that came out today!

NetApp AFX (AI Fabric Extended)

If you’ve been following my Vertex AI and SageMaker/Bedrock series, you know that real key to AI innovation is how quickly you can make decisions. With this disaggregated system, you’ll see training and inference bottlenecks (see: performance problems 101 for AI) be addressable uniquely for both compute and storage. Exabyte-level scale unlocks outcomes at the scale that IT leaders are going to be held to, sooner than everyone realizes.

NetApp AI Data Engine

NetApp’s strategic relationship with NVIDIA shines here. The tight partnership allows control over not just the compute and data layers, but also embeds intelligence. #IntelligentDataInfrastructure was a recurring theme, reinforcing the point many made years ago - that being that an organization’s data is their most valuable asset.

To any that still doubt, consider the social media model - if the product is free for you to use, YOU AND YOUR DATA ARE THE PRODUCT.

On top of that, George Kurian highlighted that the vast majority - eighty to ninety percent - of enterprise AI projects fail due to data silos and lack of insight (no pun intended) or data portability/access. That’s a scenario that is VERY addressable with NetApp, ONTAP and the concept of the data fabric!

Onto my preferred talking points - hybrid and multi-cloud deployment scenarios!

Enhanced Cyber Resilience

Last year, the great Phoebe Goh showed a real-time scenario where an attack on an environment was automatically detected and instantly restored to an alternate point in the data fabric, namely a 1P solution in FSXN, ANF or GCNV.

Now, ONTAP has announced the embedding on real-time data protection into the OS itself. This reduces a critical element - the amount of time it takes to something that gets detected/alerted on (hmm it’s almost like somebody has written about why that’s important in GCP and AWS…)

Defend the castle!

Beyond automated resilience, there is a notable update in global consistency of data availability.

FSXN in AWS got a notable update in that native integrations - featuring SnapMirror - are now available to Customers.

The same is effectively true for Google Cloud NetApp Volumes as well, via the introduction of support for FlexCache.

A similar story exists for Azure NetApp Files, further reducing latency and introducing resilience and/or multi-region capabilities.

This will only serve to accelerate the already-seen 50% YoY growth for NetApp’s 1P solutions across the last year.

I’m looking forward to seeing what gets announced on Day 2!

SnapMirror, fully supported across all three major hyperscalers - what’s not to love?!