Recap of NetApp Insight 2025

Classic annual rendez-vous for its faithfull community, NetApp organized early this week its Insight conference in Las Vegas. With 5,000 attendees approximately, the storage player insisted on AI infrastructure, cloud data services, of course partnerships ans users success.

And the real big news was the launch of AFX, the company’s answer to AI storage with new data oriented services. We covered this here but we’d like to insist on key points as this product validates some choices made by the company but also by several other players.

George Kurian, CEO, NetApp, detailed a model with 4 layers: first, a data infrastructure modernization illustrated with AFX, second, an AI data pipeline confirmed with AIDE, third, a cloud transformation here accelerated with FlexCache and fourth, finally, cyber resilience with advanced detection and solid recovery.

And as we said often, modern workloads require modern infrastructure and approach.

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First, adopting a standard parallel file storage model with pNFS marks a significant milestone for the firm. The idea of AFX is to offer a super scalable and fast storage disaggregated infrastructure ready to be connected to GPU clusters like Nvidia SuperPOD.

The second key point is related to data quality being an important aspect in the AI outcome. For that, AFX introduced another key dimension named AIDE – AI Data Engine – to offer new way to enrich data with advanced services via specific AI mechanisms. This side compute domain leverages the fast connection and uses Nvidia L4 card within the AFX domain, it is represented by up 10 DX50 nodes in one AFX config. This adds a critical data pipeline feature with cleaning and preparation, semantic search, data vectorization and data guardrails to feed external GPU clusters. Future iteration will integrate Nvidia RTX PRO servers. With AFX, Netapp is back on track in the active storage group aligned to AI challenges and requirements, it was expected following last year new architecture announcements.

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With Google, NetApp extends the service with a block mode we saw also a very convenient function named Shift for VM migrations and conversions in various combinations supporting Microsoft Hyper-V, Red Hat, Oracle Linux BM and other KVM-based images.

ONTAP 9.18.1 is the last release with improved block mode boosting the number of SVMs per cluster up tot 256, some S3 improvements as well and security with encryption.

BlueXP is replaced by a more comprehensive and global service named Console on various NetApp storage and data services.

Cyber resilience, really a hot topic on the market, is represented by the new NetApp Ransomware Resilience enhanced with advanced detection and an clever isolated recovery environment.

The global namespace capability offers cross public and private cloud with integration with NetApp Azure Files, Google Cloud NetApp Volumes and FSx plus obviously AFF, AFX and FAS thanks to FlexCache.

This Insight conference was rich in news during a week of several other users events even in the same city…

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