NetApp Delivers Secure, Zero-Copy Data Activation for the Agentic Enterprise

Enterprises will be empowered to accelerate AI innovation to machine speed

NetApp® (NASDAQ: NTAP), the Intelligent Data Infrastructure company, today announced new capabilities that enable enterprises to accelerate their adoption of agentic AI with secure, in-place, zero-copy data activation. The heterogeneous metadata capability of NetApp AI Data Engine (AIDE) helps organizations discover, understand, govern, and operationalize data where it lives, while an expanded integration with Commvault connects the NetApp Platform with Commvault recovery orchestration workflow to help customers detect attacks earlier and recover cleaner data faster.

As AI agents move from experimentation into production, enterprise data infrastructure has become a critical business dependency. Agents can read, retrieve, and act on data at machine speed, but most enterprise data estates were built for human-paced workflows: fragmented across file, object, cloud, on-premises, and sovereign environments; governed through inconsistent controls; and activated through pipelines that copy, move, and transform data before it can be used. That traditional approach creates latency, cost, compliance risk, and answers that may already be stale by the time they reach a model or agent.

“The agentic enterprise will be defined by how quickly and safely organizations can turn their data into intelligence,” said Asad Khan, Senior Vice President and General Manager, AI at NetApp. “For too long, AI initiatives have depended on complex pipelines that move data away from where it is created, governed, and protected. NetApp is taking a different approach: activating data in place with the governance, resiliency, and openness enterprises require. With AI Data Engine and our expanded work with Commvault, we are helping customers give agents trusted business context while strengthening the recovery foundation AI-driven operations depend on.”

These latest NetApp Platform updates help customers move beyond copy-first AI architectures and toward a governed, protected, zero-copy operating model for enterprise data. Key updates include:

• NetApp AI Data Engine is a core intelligence service within the NetApp Platform’s AI Data Services layer, helping organizations transform fragmented, unstructured enterprise data into trusted, AI-ready assets for analytics, assistants, and AI agents. With the new update, NetApp is expanding the availability of metadata discovery across the full enterprise data estate, including NetApp ONTAP®, StorageGRID®, and non-NetApp storage. These capabilities help customers discover and understand data in place across NFS, SMB, and S3 repositories, immediately enabling them to uncover data, reduce security risk, optimize storage, accelerate data migrations, and identify AI-ready data. NetApp is also previewing upcoming AIDE innovations, including expanded AI-powered data understanding capabilities, deeper governance intelligence, open analytics integrations with analytics engines such as Starburst and Onehouse.AI, and new agentic services designed to help enterprises securely turn data into actionable AI context at scale.
• Expanded NetApp and Commvault Joint Solution enables customers to protect and restore the data they use for AI workloads. Powered by the NetApp Platform, the solution delivers near-real-time threat detection, deeper scans that uncover evasive threats, cleanroom validation with advanced AI threat detection technology in an isolated environment, and advanced clean recovery, all from the Commvault console. It connects the NetApp Platform's autonomous ransomware protection signals on primary storage directly to Commvault recovery workflows to enable joint customers to recover in minutes rather than days or weeks without introducing reinfection.

Together, these updates advance the NetApp Platform as the data foundation for the agentic enterprise. Rather than treating AI readiness as a separate data-copy project or a closed, single-vendor stack, NetApp enables enterprises to activate existing data in place while preserving the access controls, data protection, and operational choice already in place. This approach helps customers deliver near-term storage and governance outcomes while building toward richer AI-ready data capabilities, including semantic search, knowledge graphs, decision context, and agentic activation.

“As AI-driven threats compress response times, organizations need a faster path to trusted recovery,” said Pranay Ahlawat, Chief Technology and AI Officer at Commvault. “By integrating NetApp’s ransomware detection and immutable data protection with Commvault’s clean recovery capabilities, we help customers accelerate response, restore trusted data with confidence, and reduce mean time to clean recover (MTCR).”

“Agentic AI raises the bar for enterprise data infrastructure, because agents need access to current, trusted, and governed data rather than another copy of yesterday's dataset,” said Shari Lava, GVP of AI Research at IDC. “NetApp's approach is a useful example of this shift: connecting data discovery, understanding, governance, activation, and cyber resilience at the storage layer, where much of the enterprise data estate already resides. Vendors that can do this well give customers a more pragmatic path to prepare data for AI, without the risk, cost, and complexity that often come with large-scale data movement.”

Statements by NetApp about unreleased offerings and future plans are for informational purposes only, are subject to change without notice, and should not be relied upon for purchasing or other decisions. Such statements do not constitute a commitment, obligation, guarantee, or warranty of any kind by NetApp, including about availability, functionality, pricing, or timing.

Additional Resources

• Trusted Agents Start with Trusted Data
• AI Data Engine: Make Distributed Enterprise Data Agent-Ready in Place
• Commvault: Together, NetApp and Commvault Provide Customers with a Coordinated Path to Bounce Back From Ransomware Attacks by Delivering Fast, Clean, and Trusted Recovery

About NetApp

For more than three decades, NetApp has helped the world’s leading organizations navigate change – from the rise of enterprise storage to the intelligent era defined by data and AI. Today, NetApp is the Intelligent Data Infrastructure company, helping customers turn data into a catalyst for innovation, resilience, and growth.

At the heart of that infrastructure is the NetApp data platform – the unified, enterprise-grade, intelligent foundation that connects, protects, and activates data across every cloud, workload, and environment. Built on the proven power of NetApp ONTAP, our leading data management software and OS, and enhanced by automation through the AI Data Engine and AFX, it delivers observability, resilience, and intelligence at scale.

Disaggregated by design, the NetApp data platform separates storage, services, and control so enterprises can modernize faster, scale efficiently, and innovate without lock-in. As the only enterprise storage platform natively embedded in the world’s largest clouds, it gives organizations the freedom to run any workload anywhere with consistent performance, governance, and protection.

With NetApp, data is always ready – ready to defend against threats, ready to power AI, and ready to drive the next breakthrough. That’s why the world’s most forward-thinking enterprises trust NetApp to turn intelligence into advantage.

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