Data infrastructure company NetApp has expanded its partnership with Google Cloud to make it easier for organizations to leverage their data for generative AI (GenAI) and other hybrid cloud workloads.
NetApp and Google Cloud announced the Flex service level for Google Cloud NetApp Volumes, which supports storage volumes of virtually any size. NetApp also released a preview of the GenAI toolkit reference architecture for Search Augmented Generation (RAG) tasks using the Google Cloud Vertex AI platform.
More flexible data storage options for Google Cloud NetApp volumes
Google Cloud and NetApp announced a new service level for NetApp Volumes called Flex, which gives customers more granular control to tailor storage and performance to the exact needs of their cloud workloads.
“The growing demand for data-intensive applications and insights reinforces the need for a new approach to unified data storage that gives organizations the agility to move and store data wherever and whenever it is needed,” said Pravjit Tiwana, senior vice president. .” he said. General Manager of Cloud Storage at NetApp. “By expanding our collaboration with Google Cloud, we are providing a flexible form factor that can run on existing infrastructure across Google Cloud systems without compromising enterprise data management capabilities.”
With the addition of Flex, NetApp Volumes customers can choose from four service levels to take advantage of fully managed file services built on NetApp ONTAP.TM Operates on Google Cloud, including:
- standard: Highly available general-purpose storage with advanced data management features and 16 MiB/sec per TiB performance, recommended to support workloads such as file sharing, virtual machines (VMs), and DevTest environments.
- premium: Highly available, high-performance storage with 64 MiB/sec per TiB performance and advanced data management features recommended for file shares, VMs, and databases.
- Extreme: High-availability, low-latency, high-throughput storage with advanced data management features and 128 MiB/sec per TiB performance, recommended for online transaction processing (OLTP) high-performance databases and low-latency applications.
- Warm up: Highly available storage volumes with scalability from 1 GiB to 100 TiB and performance up to 1 GiB/s depending on the size of the underlying storage pool. This adaptive service level can support a variety of use cases, including AI.
“Google Cloud NetApp Volumes remains a critical component of every enterprise’s digital transformation strategy,” said Sameet Agarwal, GM/VP of Google Cloud Storage at Google Cloud. “NetApp Volumes will leverage Google Cloud technologies to power new capabilities that can improve the way businesses run and create real value for their organizations.”
Flex service levels are scheduled to be generally available in 15 Google Cloud regions by Q2 2024, with expansion to other Google Cloud regions by the end of 2024.
Leveraging enterprise data for generative AI on Google Cloud
NetApp also released a preview of its GenAI toolkit supporting NetApp Volumes. Together with the accompanying reference architecture, this product accelerates the implementation of RAG operations while enabling a secure, consistent, and automated workflow that securely connects data stored on NetApp Volumes with the Google Cloud Vertex AI platform. The result is an increased ability to generate unique, high-quality, and highly relevant insights and automation.
“As an intelligent data infrastructure company, we have unparalleled capabilities to support data classification, tagging, mobility and data replication to help our customers run efficient and secure AI data pipelines,” said Pravjit Tiwana, senior vice president and general manager. said. NetApp’s cloud storage manager. “By simplifying RAG through our partnership with Google Cloud, our customers can leverage market-leading AI services and models to create a unique competitive advantage.”
The NetApp GenAI toolkit helps optimize the RAG process with unique features including:
- A common data space everywhere: NetApp ONTAP allows customers to easily include data from all environments to power RAG activities through common operational processes while reducing risk, cost, and time to results.
- Automatic classification and tagging: NetApp’s BlueXP classification service automatically tags data to enable streamlined data cleansing for both the ingestion and inference stages of the data pipeline, ensuring the correct data is used in queries and sensitive data is not exposed to out-of-policy models. Guaranteed.
- Fast and scalable snapshots: ONTAP Snapshot creates space-efficient copies of vector stores and databases almost instantly, allowing immediate rollback to previous versions if data is corrupted or forwarded for point-in-time analysis.
- Real-time replication at scale: ONTAP FlexClone technology creates instant clones of vector index stores, making unique, relevant data securely available for a variety of queries by a variety of users without impacting core production data.
“GenAI is a wave of opportunity for companies that can effectively apply data to their industries,” said Miles Ward, CTO of SADA, An Insight Company. “At SADA, we are passionate about combining our extensive expertise with NetApp and Vertex AI to help our customers accelerate their AI journey. Why create uninformative chat when you can generate unique, specific, and relevant insights?”
The GenAI Toolkit will be available in public preview in the second half of 2024.
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