TECH outfit NetApp Malaysia Sdn Bhd has expanded its enterprise data platform with new capabilities aimed at helping organisations overcome one of the biggest barriers to artificial intelligence (AI) adoption: managing and governing data across complex global environments.
The enhancements include the launch of NetApp AI Data Engine (AIDE), a secure and unified AI data platform stack co-engineered with NVIDIA and integrated with the NVIDIA AI Data Platform reference design, according to the Malaysian arm of intelligent data infrastructure outfit NetApp.
Editor’s Note: A US tech giant, Nvidia is the world’s dominant provider of graphics processing units (GPUs) for gaming, professional visualisation and artificial intelligence (AI).
The new offering is designed to help enterprises better discover, understand and govern unstructured data across their data estates while enabling them to use more accurate and up-to-date information throughout the AI pipeline from data selection and transformation to retrieval, serving and deployment in AI applications and agents.
“Despite massive investments and market pressures to leverage AI for improved productivity and enhanced business decision making, data challenges are bottlenecking projects before they even reach production,” explained NetApp chief product officer Syam.
“To regain control of their data, customers need a mature enterprise-grade data platform that was designed disaggregated and intelligent from the beginning so that storage, services and control scale independently without lock-in.”
In this regard, NetApp’s AIDE includes a continuously updated global metadata catalogue with search capabilities that go beyond standard file system metadata by analysing file content and semantically enriching metadata in place.
More AI-powered products in the pipeline
This allows enterprises to avoid repeatedly moving data while able to reduce both security risks and additional costs.
According to NetApp, AIDE will be rolled out this month for an initial group of lighthouse customers and partner, with broader availability expected in early summer.
On the same note, it will continue to expand integrations with independent software vendors across on-premises and cloud environments. These include support for AI development platforms and frameworks such as Microsoft Azure-based AI applications, Google Cloud Vertex AI and LangChain.
Over the coming months, AIDE will also support a wider range of deployment options, including use with NVIDIA RTX PRO 4500 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs and NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs as well as deployment across NetApp storage environments such as AFF A-Series, AFF C-Series and FAS.
Moreover, NetApp will also support NVIDIA STX, a modular rack-scale storage reference architecture for agentic AI built with NVIDIA Vera Rubin and NVIDIA BlueField-4 DPUs.
The architecture is designed to improve power efficiency, throughput and security while helping enterprises better connect AI compute with unstructured data storage. – April 8, 2026
