NetApp and Cisco have announced updated solutions focused on enterprise use cases in artificial intelligence (AI). Building on their existing FlexPod collaboration, they provide validated architectures intended to support AI management and maintain security across organisations of different sizes.
Expanding FlexPod for AI: The recent updates to FlexPod are designed for enterprises deploying complex AI workloads. The solutions focus on established enterprise data management capabilities, with an emphasis on operational simplicity and reliability. They aim to reduce integration complexity and support AI functions closer to where data is stored, supported by built-in security features.
Enterprise AI Deployments: FlexPod is designed to support AI infrastructure deployment, including retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and semantic search use cases. Its architecture enables performance scaling through disaggregated storage. It also incorporates NetApp AI Data Engine and NVIDIA platforms to support data discovery, preparation, and governance, with security controls aligned to zero trust principles.
NetApp, Cisco, and NVIDIA have also based parts of the FlexPod approach on NVIDIA’s Enterprise Reference Architectures. This collaboration is intended to help organisations design, operate, and scale AI infrastructure for high-performance workloads with more predictable outcomes.
Supporting AI on the Edge: FlexPod extends to edge computing use cases, supporting AI inference and low-latency workloads in distributed environments. Using Cisco’s Unified Edge with NetApp storage configurations, the system is intended to provide consistent operations across locations and improve deployment efficiency.
These integrated solutions support centralised, policy-based automation for managing infrastructure at scale, compared with more customised or isolated IT setups.
Overall, the updated FlexPod AI capabilities are positioned to support enterprises implementing AI infrastructure with an emphasis on performance, scalability, and security.
