DBT Bureau
Pune, 11 April 2025
NetApp, the intelligent data infrastructure company, and Google Cloud announced new capabilities for Google Cloud NetApp Volumes, a fully managed file storage service, that reduce complexity and increase performance for cloud storage workloads, while fully integrating into the Google Cloud service ecosystem. Customers will be able to effortlessly scale high-performance enterprise apps and databases, including workloads with petabyte-scale datasets, such as electronic design automation (EDA), AI applications, and content data repositories.
As businesses navigate the era of intelligence, managing data across on-premises systems and the cloud is a critical capability. Intelligent data infrastructure breaks down silos and enables seamless, real-time integration across hybrid-cloud environments, turning raw data into actionable insights. By collaborating with Google Cloud, NetApp is empowering businesses to harness the power of AI, driving greater agility and innovation at scale.
“For many organisations, the cloud is the fastest and simplest path to using AI to uncover data-driven insights,” said Pravjit Tiwana, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Cloud Storage at NetApp. “Our collaboration with Google Cloud is accelerating generative AI data pipelines by seamlessly integrating the latest AI innovations with the robust data management capabilities of NetApp ONTAP®. The new capabilities of NetApp Volumes help customers scale their cloud storage to meet the demands of the modern, high-performance applications and datasets that drive meaningful business outcomes.”
Google Cloud and NetApp are introducing new capabilities in NetApp Volumes to enhance the scalability and performance of enterprise applications and databases with new capabilities including:
● Integration with Google Cloud’s Vertex AI Platform: Customers will soon be able to use their data stored in NetApp Volumes directly in the Vertex AI platform. By leveraging the broader capabilities of Vertex AI, customers will be able to build custom agents without needing to build their own solutions to manage data pipelines for retrieval augmented generation (RAG) applications.
● Improvements for Premium and Extreme Service Levels: Performance improvements to Google Cloud NetApp Volumes large capacity volumes are now generally available in all 14 regions where the Premium and Extreme service levels are offered. With these improvements to large capacity volumes, customers can provision a single volume starting at 15TiB that can be scaled up to 1PiB with up to 30 GiB/s of throughput, allowing customers to move petabyte-scale datasets for large workloads like EDA, AI applications, and content data repositories to NetApp Volumes without partitioning data across multiple volumes.
● Improvements for Flex Service Level: Customers can now preview independent scaling of capacity and performance to avoid overprovisioning of capacity to meet their performance needs with the NetApp Volumes Flex service level. This will enable users to create storage pools by individually selecting capacity, throughput and IOPS with the ability to scale throughput up to 5 GiB/s and IOPS up to 160K to right-size their storage and optimise costs.
● Google Cloud Assured Workloads Onboarding: NetApp Volumes will soon support the Assured Workloads framework that Google Cloud customers use to easily configure and maintain controlled environments that operate within the parameters of a specific compliance regime. Customers using NetApp Volumes under Assured Workloads will meet the data residency, transparent access control, and cloud key management solution compliance requirements specific to their region.
“Simplified access to AI is a democratising force enabling organisations to leverage their most critical asset—data—for a competitive edge,” said Sameet Agarwal, vice president and general manager, Google’s Cloud Storage. “Organisations can leverage their NetApp ONTAP on-premises data and hybrid cloud environments. By combining the capabilities of Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform with Google Cloud NetApp Volumes, we’re delivering a powerful solution to help customers accelerate digital transformation and position themselves for long-term success.”
“At OpenText, we rely on NetApp for several critical storage technologies. On GCP we heavily rely on Google Cloud NetApp Volumes for our data storage needs” said Stan Rock, Principal Technology Architect at OpenText. “The global availability of Google Cloud NetApp Volumes service levels and the broad range of capacity and performance provisioning options have helped us operate more efficiently and respond with agility to our changing business needs.”
