KUALA LUMPUR: NetApp Malaysia Sdn Bhd is stepping up its push into enterprise artificial intelligence with the launch of a new AI-focused data platform enhancement developed alongside NVIDIA, as organisations grapple with growing challenges around data discovery, governance and readiness for production AI.
The company said its new NetApp AI Data Engine, or AIDE, is designed to help enterprises manage one of the biggest obstacles in AI adoption: identifying, understanding and governing large volumes of data spread across complex global environments.
NetApp said AIDE creates and continuously updates a global metadata catalogue with search capabilities, enabling organisations to find, curate and govern the right data throughout the AI pipeline, from selection and transformation to retrieval, serving and use in AI applications and agents.
Syam Nair, NetApp chief product officer (pic), said that despite heavy investment in AI, many projects were being slowed or stalled before reaching production because of unresolved data issues.
“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,” he said.
He said customers needed a mature enterprise-grade data platform that allowed storage, services and control to scale independently without lock-in, adding that NetApp’s broader data platform was intended to support enterprise-grade AI factories built on high-performance unified storage.
The launch also strengthens NetApp’s alignment with NVIDIA’s growing AI ecosystem. According to the company, AIDE has been co-engineered with NVIDIA and integrated with the NVIDIA AI Data Platform reference design, while future deployment options will support newer NVIDIA server GPUs and a wider range of NetApp storage environments.
NetApp said the initial rollout of AIDE will begin this month with selected lighthouse customers and partners, with broader availability expected in early summer.
Over the coming months, the company said AIDE will expand to support more deployment models across hybrid cloud environments and introduce multimodal data capabilities, including support for visual data. It also plans to add stronger agentic AI support to enable governed workflows across enterprise data estates using industry-standard protocols.
The company said it will continue building integrations with independent software vendors and major cloud-based AI platforms, including Microsoft Azure-based AI applications, Google Cloud Vertex AI and LangChain, as part of its wider open ecosystem approach.
NetApp also highlighted its collaboration with Cisco, saying AIDE will be used alongside FlexPod AI, part of Cisco’s AI POD portfolio, to help customers bring AI closer to where their data resides.
Jeremy Foster, Cisco senior vice president and general manager of compute, said the joint offering was aimed at accelerating enterprise AI adoption by combining compute, storage, networking, security and observability into a single stack.
NetApp also said it would support NVIDIA STX, a modular rack-scale storage reference architecture for agentic AI, as enterprises seek better ways to manage growing AI workloads and unstructured data at scale.
