NetApp announced the expansion of its decade-long relationship with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to help joint customers continuously fuel business growth and innovation in the artificial intelligence (AI) era.

Signing a new Strategic Collaboration Agreement (SCA) builds on the commitment to benefit joint customers by accelerating generative AI efforts, simplifying transactions, and delivering CloudOps value.

NetApp and AWS have worked together for over a decade to jointly accelerate innovation for thousands of customers worldwide. In that time, NetApp has achieved more than a dozen AWS competencies, including the Manufacturing and Industrial Software, Financial Services Technology, and Cloud Operations Software competencies. AWS Competencies validate AWS Partners with demonstrated AWS technical expertise and proven customer success. NetApp is the only enterprise storage vendor with a first-party data storage service natively built on AWS with Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP®, a service that unlocks the best of cloud for customers by delivering the industry-leading data management operating system on AWS. The innovation between NetApp and AWS provides customers with a strong technology foundation for cloud-based data and operations services that prepares them to overcome current and future challenges. NetApp also supports operations for cloud infrastructure environments, including AWS, with CloudOps solutions such as Spot by NetApp, NetApp Cloud Insights, and Instaclustr by NetApp. These solutions combine machine learning (ML) and analytics to simplify, automate, and optimize operations in the cloud, helping customers reduce costs, secure their data, and get the most out of their cloud investments.

“With NetApp cloud solutions on AWS, our customers maintain full control over their data across their entire hybrid cloud environment while benefiting from industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance of AWS,” said Ashish Dhawan, Senior Vice President of Cloud Sales at NetApp. “That’s all made possible because our engineering teams are so in sync. Together, NetApp and AWS help customers continuously fuel business growth and innovation by delivering data-rich experiences through workload migration and new application deployments on AWS.”

The expansion of the collaboration between NetApp and AWS will benefit customers by:

- Accelerating Generative AI Efforts: This SCA will accelerate generative AI efforts, helping customers continuously fuel business growth and innovation by delivering data-rich experiences through workload migration and new application deployments on AWS. NetApp recently released BlueXP workload factory to help customers connect ONTAP with foundation models (FMs) through Amazon Bedrock and extend their on-premises data estate for building generative AI applications. AWS and NetApp also published reference architecture guidance for customers to integrate proprietary enterprise data on FSx for ONTAP into generative AI pipelines using retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and APIs for Amazon Bedrock, enabling secure, high-performance use with foundation models. The collaboration between AWS and NetApp simplifies, accelerates, and enables the ability to generate unique, high-quality, and ultra-relevant data insights. Instaclustr by NetApp manages open source vector databases, a crucial component in the delivery of fast and accurate results in RAG architectures. The close collaboration between AWS and NetApp on these advanced workloads makes it simpler and faster for customers to unlock value from their data using RAG.

- Simplifying Transactions: This SCA will enable increased AWS Marketplace purchases, especially for NetApp CloudOps solutions, to streamline processes for customers. It will also enable customers to more easily implement technical proof of concepts to evaluate how NetApp solutions on AWS can support their operations.

- Delivering CloudOps Value: This SCA better positions NetApp as a trusted provider of CloudOps solutions for AWS environments. Investments from AWS enable NetApp to better position and deliver cost and performance optimization solutions through the AWS Marketplace. NetApp’s close relationship with AWS shows customers they can trust that NetApp solutions will integrate seamlessly into their cloud operations and help them achieve their goals for the performance, protection, scalability, and availability of their workloads and data.