NetApp Insight 2025 Recap

October 14-16, 2025, saw NetApp's annual customer and partner conference, called Insight, at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. As is conference custom, it consisted of keynote speeches by various leaders, exciting product announcements, breakout sessions and an expo hall. It was NetApp's opportunity to say thanks and discuss its plans for the coming year. At the expo hall, NetApp product teams and partners directly engaged with customers. Take a moment to review key highlights as we wrap some context around them.

Hardware/traditional

AFX

It wouldn't be a conference in 2025 without artificial intelligence being mentioned. The most pressing challenge to good AI implementation is data wrangling, and NetApp is keenly focused on making this easier for customers. They announced their new flagship storage platform, AFX, that is oriented toward AI and other high-end file workloads. AFX is disaggregated, meaning the drives are not captive to a single controller or pair of controllers. Rather, it can have up to 128 controllers and 52 NVMe storage shelves, independently scalable to drive a claimed 4TB/s and 70PB of internal capacity! If that's not enough data capacity, FabricPool works too, so you can cross the exabyte barrier with offloaded data.

AFX utilizes the same ONTAP operating environment used by the rest of the AFF/ASA/FAS portfolio, which is powerful. Out of the gate, the system has the security certifications NetApp is known for and has near feature parity with its siblings. Importantly, it integrates into the rest of your ONTAP ecosystem, utilizing FabricPool, SnapMirror, and Autonomous Ransomware Protection (ARP), amongst others. What it doesn't have currently is support for block workloads or MetroCluster, but I don't think those are key for its intended workloads.

Workload security

NetApp is keenly focused on the cybersecurity chops of their systems and are rightly proud of their certifications (e.g. CSfC). Cybersecurity requires a holistic approach, and the storage system is just a link in that chain; however, that storage system is the last line of defense against exfiltration or encryption and the first method for recovering data. Autonomous Ransomware Protection (ARP) is a feature unique to NetApp ONTAP, as it's native to the system and not an external add-on. ARP monitors block volumes and file systems for changes in 'entropy,' and NetApp continually improves its capabilities. This year, NetApp released some updates to its ransomware portfolio; let's dive in.

• NetApp Ransomware Resilience – The new name for the former NetApp Ransomware Protection Service. While a mere name change, Ransomware Resilience better describes the suite when considering the additions to the package.
• Data Breach Detection – This new capability identifies anomalous access behaviors that may indicate early signs of exfiltration. ONTAP will raise alerts to the customer's SEIM software.
• Isolated recovery environments (IRE) – After a breach is suspected,  IRE assists in creating a secure, air-gapped space for validating data security before restoration. Utilizing proprietary AI scanning, the system identifies compromised data, allowing for a quick determination of which copies are safe to use for system/business restart.

Cyber events are different from traditional DR. When your failover event is weather-based, you aren't really worried about the safety of your systems, but when attackers have dwell times of months or years, everything is suspect. To protect, it takes tools, firewalls, and lots of logging and correlation to stay, hopefully, one step ahead of bad actors.

Cloud/software-defined

NetApp is a leader in first-party cloud storage and their product sets integrate seamlessly into your existing NetApp ONTAP data fabrics. Several important announcements were made, which further enhance their offerings.

Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP

While the fully managed FSx for ONTAP is not new, what NetApp announced was integration with Amazon Elastic VMware Service (EVS). It supports rapid VMware workload migration via the same tools and workflows you use in your physical data center. This provides operational consistency, reducing migration risk and speeding up workload mobility. Additionally, a slew of new capabilities exists: NFS 4.1, NVMe datastores, and multi-AZ file systems, amongst others.

Google Cloud NetApp Volumes (GCNV)

GCNV now supports iSCSI block storage and is natively integrated as a data source for AI applications front-ended by Gemini Enterprise, Google's AI platform. It now provides the same truly unified access you get on-premises. This integration enables AI deployment in minutes instead of months. 

Azure NetApp Files

Azure NetApp Files now delivers 4x performance compared to previous versions. The obvious benefits here are doing more, faster. It supports mission-critical ONTAP workloads and integrates with Azure Discovery and Magenta AI. There's also an object API, allowing seamless access to file data by Azure data services.

FlexCache Across All Major Clouds

FlexCache now supports global namespace and smart caching across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and on-premises. It enables instantaneous data distribution without external appliances or gateways, for truly global, low-latency operations.

Cyber Resilience in the Cloud

NetApp introduced its market-leading Autonomous Ransomware Detection, Data Breach Discovery, and an Isolated Recovery Environment, all built into the cloud-native data platform. Combined, these provide a potent component in the defense against malicious actors, as well as a safe recovery should something go awry.

The AI Angle

AIDE

As if being SuperPOD certified out of the gate wasn't enough, AFX has an optional AI-oriented sidekick, AI Data Engine, or AIDE for short. With onboard Epyc CPUs, GPUs and some K8s-based data services, AIDE has a significant amount of horsepower to bring AI to the data, communicating with the storage system via pNFS for optimal performance. 

As mentioned above, data wrangling is the most challenging and crucial component of maximizing the value from your AI initiatives. The amount of data at play means hand-wrangling is impossible, and automated methods are required. To that end, AIDE does four things to help.

• An onboard metadata engine to help data scientists find data across typically disparate silos. Additionally, it can enrich metadata in an automated fashion to help AI find data later.
• A data sync tool to ensure the data used by AI is always the most recent. ONTAP's time-tested SnapMirror and SnapDiff are used to send only changed/updated data to the other locations with that data.
• Data needs to be protected, not just against deletion or destruction, but also from improper access. For example, AIDE has a guardrails function that can detect personal data and mask fields from use.
• Perhaps most importantly, it has a data curator. Utilizing NIM, AIDE can vectorize data and, with the assistance of NetApp's deduplication and compression engine, reduce storage requirements by up to 10 times compared to other options. This vector database can be utilized by tools such as LLMs and agents in semantic search applications.

AIDE's release is oriented toward AFX, but it doesn't have to stay that way. It can certainly use and catalog data from other ONTAP systems, so we expect qualification further down the road. This would further break down the silos that restrain our customers' AI deployments.

Conclusion

The world of data continues to grow at a staggering rate. In fact, an estimated 402 million terabytes (402 exabytes) are created daily, and this volume is growing at ~23% annually. While most of that may be cat videos, that volume is unmanageable without intelligent systems in place. That intelligence includes how data is categorized, enriched, replicated, protected, and optimized. With the announcements at Insight, NetApp takes a major step toward intelligent data infrastructure. 

Please feel free to reach out if you would like to learn more.