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In this presentation, Jeff Baxter, VP of Product Marketing at NetApp, discusses how NetApp is enabling enterprise-grade artificial intelligence through a comprehensive intelligent data infrastructure. By addressing four key imperatives—modernizing data centers, transitioning to the cloud, adopting AI, and ensuring cyber resilience—NetApp aims to help organizations transform how they manage and utilize data.
Baxter underscored NetApp’s singular focus on data infrastructure, highlighting the evolution of the ONTAP operating system as a consistent data plane across environments—from on-premises systems to public and sovereign clouds. A major topic was the unveiling of the NetApp data platform and the importance of AI-ready data. Baxter asserted that many AI projects fail, not due to flawed models or lack of talent, but because the data isn’t prepared for AI—emphasizing issues like accessibility, compliance, and integration. With this challenge in mind, NetApp is repositioning itself as a true data platform company, absorbing years of enterprise experience into a unified, resilient, and highly available backbone for modern workloads.
Baxter then introduced two significant product announcements: the NetApp AFX system and the NetApp AI Data Engine, together named the NetApp AFX AI portfolio. AFX is a disaggregated storage architecture built on enhanced ONTAP, allowing for scalable performance and storage capacity separately—ideal for diverse AI workloads. The AI Data Engine complements this by providing a high-speed, secure data pipeline integrated with a vector database optimized for AI use cases like retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). This engine supports semantic search, data guardrails, and AI-ready APIs, pushing AI workloads into full enterprise territory with the reliability, compliance, and availability expectations that business-critical systems require.
Personnel: Jeff Baxter
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