NetApp INSIGHT 2025: The Enterprise Data Platform—Intelligent, Resilient, Disaggregated

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Pravjit Tiwana

CTO & SVP - Cloud Storage & Services Business Unit,

NetApp

Ashish Dhawan

SVP & Chief Revenue Officer

NetApp

play_circle_outline Hyperscaler neutrality and integration with various AI and analytics platforms.

play_circle_outline Importance of a multi-cloud strategy for customer flexibility and choice.

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Pravjit Tiwana & Ashish Dhawan, NetApp

Pravjit Tiwana

CTO & SVP - Cloud Storage & Services Business Unit, NetApp

Ashish Dhawan

SVP & Chief Revenue Officer NetApp

In this NetApp INSIGHT 2025 conversation from Las Vegas, theCUBE Research’s Christophe Bertrand sits down with NetApp leaders Pravjit Tiwana (senior vice president and general manager of cloud storage & services) and Ashish Dhawan (senior vice president and chief revenue officer of cloud business unit) to unpack the day’s cloud announcements and what they mean for customers. Tiwana details NetApp’s “bring AI to the data” approach – natively integrated across all three hyperscalers’ AI/analytics stacks (Amazon Bedrock & Q, Azure AI and Google’s Gemini Enterpri... Read more

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Pravjit Tiwana & Ashish Dhawan, NetApp

Christophe Bertrand

>> Welcome back to Vegas, NetApp INSIGHT 2025. I'm Christophe Bertrand, principal analyst with theCUBE Research, and we are going to be talking a little bit about cloud. I have two great guests. I have Pravjit Tiwana, you're SVP and GM of the cloud storage and services business, not a small job. And another interesting speaker, Ashish Dhawan, and you're SVP and GM and CRO for the cloud business unit, so absolutely at the heart of what's going on with the cloud business at NetApp. Look, it was a great keynote. I heard a lot of very interesting things. I'm going to start with you, Pravjit, and I'm curious about what your take is on the announcements today. I mean, I heard hyperscaler neutrality. I heard we'll talk about the top values for Google Cloud. Let's talk about that. What's your take on the announcements?

Pravjit Tiwana

>> If you see our journey started in cloud almost eight, 10 years back, but in the last 12 to 18 months, we have really amped up not only just in terms of capabilities which we are bringing to our customers, but also the usage of our cloud storage resources. If you look into the announcements which were made at the keynote today, there are a few which really stand out in terms of themes of what we are doing. The first one is like what George and Syam also spoke about, is to bring AI to the data. We are one of the uniquely differentiated storage sources out there where we are natively integrated into each of the three hyperscalers, AI and analytics stacks, be it Bedrock and Q in Amazon or Azure AI and analytics sources, or Gemini Enterprise and Google. The point being with our capabilities like SnapMirror and FlexCache, you never have to move the data out. You can bring your AI and analytics right to where the data is. Then the second aspect of that theme is also about, right, our customers love that for their workloads they have a multiprotocol support, so they have both file and block capabilities enabled from a single place so they don't have to use different vendors for different things. In continuation of that, ask from our customers, we have specifically now have not just file storage in each of our hyperscalers, but we also have block storage available in our hyperscalers. That was one of the other great, which we shared today in the keynote about was the GCNV block. We already have it FSx and ON. So that is the second theme of it is. And third is, right, while AI is definitely driving a lot of innovation, but we are laser focused on workloads like SAP, EDA, HPC, VMware and so on. So if you see even for EDA kind of workloads, Microsoft, Amazon, their internal chip design systems are also using our cloud storage services available there so we are bringing lots and lots of capabilities on that. The couple other small things which are not small things, but really attractive things which are very close to me are the first one is we are enabling the persona of developers to use our cloud storage services. We also announced, right, Visual Studio Code extensions where developers can use chat-like interface to start using our cloud storage sources. And also, we announced data migrator, which is basically a free capability with high security and less error or zero error aspirations to migrate your NFS and SMB data over from any storage system over to our cloud storage. Some of all these capabilities were driven working backward from the customer ask, and we very excited about how they're being received by our customers.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Right, and there are many customers here today, and we had some great customer examples as well during the keynote so I was very interested in what you described because it's actually extremely comprehensive. More importantly, if you take a step back, what it does, it really talks to unification and freedom of choice. So pick your cloud, pick your partner, we're going to work with it. We're going to give you the same experience and allow you to move from one to the other and build your data platform, which is the big turn was used today, and all of that with on tap and with NetApp at the heart of it on-prem, the cloud, hybrid. I'd like to double click on what you mentioned, the Google Cloud Volumes for NetApp, or did I say the GCNV? Did I say it correctly?

Ashish Dhawan

>> Yes.

Christophe Bertrand

>> I almost did not use the acronym, but we're in tech, we love acronyms. So actually I'm going to ask you, Ashish, to tell us more about it and what your take is on the introduction and what you expect it to do from a business perspective. I imagine a lot of your time, if not most of your time with clients, with customers, how critical is it that you've just announced this?

Ashish Dhawan

>> GCNV or Google Cloud NetApp Volumes is one of the most performant storage services within the Google platform, Google Cloud platform. Now, with this announcement that GCNV will support the block protocol, it gives the customers the freedom to look at GCNV as the storage service of choice without worrying whether the protocol used is file storage or block storage. I remember one of my customers telling me that they love the solutions from NetApp because of the unified storage platform that we had. In fact, one customer said, "Hey, I feel like Henry Ford, I've given my team members the choice that you should use any storage platform as long as it's NetApp." The reason is unified storage. You never have to worry about protocol conversions, worry about this this workload is for file, this other workload is for block. It also gives the customers the freedom to plan their future, also gives the customers to look at workloads which are cross data center like VMware, which inherently have both file and block workloads.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Right.

Ashish Dhawan

>> And they can then therefore use this to migrate the entire data center. So again, the real benefit is freedom. The real benefit is choice, and they're able to plan their future focused on the workloads rather than focused on minor share, protocol conversions, et cetera.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Let me continue with you, Ashish, because you brought up a customer that you spoke with. If you think about all of your customers, you're dealing with a variety of customers across the board here, how do you expect them to respond and react to these announcements that you heard today for cloud and beyond?

Ashish Dhawan

>> I think the customers are looking at a partner to migrate their most critical workload. They're looking at, "Hey, we need somebody who first helps us migrate." And then once you've done the migration, the customers want a partner that can then utilize the migrated data for AI outcomes. With GCNV now becoming a unified storage platform, it becomes a single platform that can be used, A, for migrating their most critical workloads like VMware, like SAP, and many other workloads, as well as becoming that data pipeline like Pravjit said, that data pipeline to use things like Gemini Enterprise, which they want to use for the AI outcomes. So imagine this becomes now the single service for both migration and AI work that's powerful and the customers are going to respond very well. We've already spoken with many of them during the initial stages and they're very excited about the stage.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Right, and it really changes in many ways the traditional use cases that you would've seen even a few years ago. I did start in this business when it was yes, cloud and file was very different worlds definitely, and an object came up. So definitely we're in a different world now. I think AI is bringing it together. But I want to come back to a couple of comments for both made on other workloads, not just AI because let's talk about what I will colloquially say what's on the truck. I mean, today your customers are managing SAPs, they're managing a number of transactional environments and applications and a bunch of other things and virtual environments, et cetera. So beyond AI, and I'm going to turn to you, Pravjit, on this one, what other workloads would you like to highlight to run the show, run the business?

Pravjit Tiwana

>> No, you are right. AI though is one of our futuristic and transformative workloads, but we are not taking our eyes of the workloads which has been running on-prem and cloud storage for decades, right? And where we shine in those is if you see over the last 30 years, we have built a lot of differentiated features and capabilities in our storage portfolio. We are on tap, right, be it around security, be it around performance, be it on throughput, be it around data management capabilities, especially the capabilities like SnapMirror or FlexCache or snapshotting or thin clones, we are bringing all those on-tap capabilities into the cloud. And where we are seeing more and more usage from our customers is especially around the workloads, which you were referring to especially right like EDA and HPC is one of our hero workloads, same as VMware and databases and GenFile will always be there. So while we are transforming our cloud storage offerings into being more and more AI ready, but this doesn't mean that we are slowing down our pace or the capabilities which we are building for our traditional workloads as less so it'll be a healthy mix, more and more healthy mix going forward.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Yes. And I was going to ask you, Ashish, in closing, how do you see the AI infrastructure evolving, especially in the context of gen AI and the intense resources that are needed? What are your customers telling you they want to do next?

Ashish Dhawan

>> Customers are very clear, they don't want to create their own models anymore. The frontier models that are there, which are hosted on each of the hyperscalers are getting to a parameter level that they are so good that they don't need to create their own models. At the same time, they also want to make sure that they utilize their own enterprise data for RAG and inferencing. And I think for that, the infrastructure setup is exactly what NetApp is trying to build. We want to make sure that for RAG and inferencing, they are able to connect to the hyperscalers. With the data pipelines that we're building, they're able to utilize the platforms like Amazon Bedrock, like Gemini Enterprise and Google Vertex AI, like Microsoft Foundry using our own first party cloud services, and then have the power of the enterprise data deliver the enterprise AI outcomes that they want. That's powerful because up until now, they were getting AI outcomes only for small part of their data estate. Their data was so disparate that they would not be able to get the entire outcome, which inferencing outcome. We're helping them build the infrastructure to get enterprise AI from their entire estate. That's unique, that's differentiated, and I think that'll help them in getting what they want in the future as well.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Well, thank you very much, Ashish. Pravjit, thank you also for your comments. Great announcements, lots of great work for you guys in the cloud space, and thank you so much for sharing this with us here on theCUBE.

Pravjit Tiwana

>> Thank you.

Ashish Dhawan

>> Thank you.

Christophe Bertrand

>> And to our viewers, stay tuned. Christophe Bertrand, Principal Analyst here at theCUBE Research. We'll be back at NetApp 2025 here.