NetApp INSIGHT 2025: The Enterprise Data Platform—Intelligent, Resilient, Disaggregated | Russell Fishman, NetApp & Tony Paikeday, NVIDIA

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Russell Fishman

Sr. Director of Solutions Product Management & Field Advocacy

NetApp

Tony Paikeday

Senior Director of AI Systems

NVIDIA

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Russell Fishman, NetApp & Tony Paikeday, NVIDIA

Russell Fishman

Sr. Director of Solutions Product Management & Field Advocacy NetApp

Tony Paikeday

Senior Director of AI Systems NVIDIA

In this NetApp INSIGHT 2025 conversation from Las Vegas, theCUBE Research’s Christophe Bertrand sits down with Russell Fishman, senior director of product management and solutions at NetApp, and Tony Paikeday, senior director of AI systems at NVIDIA, to unpack what it really takes to move from AI pilots to production-grade ROI. The discussion zeroes in on the “era of enterprise AI” and “intelligent data,” where context-rich data – not just powerful models – determines value. Fishman outlines how NetApp and NVIDIA are partnering to help enterprises unlock the ... Read more

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Russell Fishman, NetApp & Tony Paikeday, NVIDIA

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Christophe Bertrand

>> Welcome back to Las Vegas, NetApp INSIGHT 2025. I'm Christophe Bertrand, Principal Analyst with theCUBE Research, and I'm joined today by two great speakers and partners. More importantly, Russell Fishman, Senior Director of Product Management and Solutions.

Russell Fishman

>> That'll do.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Okay, and Field Advocacy. And Tony Paikeday, and you are Senior Director of AI Systems at NVIDIA. I wonder what we're going to be talking about, gentlemen.

Russell Fishman

>> I can't imagine.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Well, let's start with you, Russell. So let's talk about this problem with ROI. There was this research that I'm sure you've seen from MIT saying, "Well, a lot of companies are not quite getting yet to ROI with AI." And I'm sure there are lots of very good reasons for that, but we know it's going to happen. But how would you advise them? What would you advise them to do to really unlock what is in the way today? And really specifically, could you place this in the context of this partnership and maybe some recent announcements?

Russell Fishman

>> Yeah, so thank you for that question. Look, we had obviously our kickoff this morning, and we had our CEO, George Kurian, talking a little bit about the fact that we're entering into this new era. We like to call it the era of enterprise AI, but it's also the era of intelligent data.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Correct.

Russell Fishman

>> And ROI for us is really all about the difference between trying AI out and actually getting it into a production context where there's actually an ROI associated with it, right? And listen, don't get me wrong, there's plenty of organizations that have been fairly successful with AI up to now. I think we're just on the precipice of being able to open up to a much broader set of customers and organizations that don't have that sophistication, just want to get to that answer, get to the ROI, get to the outcomes. And what we announced today as NetApp in conjunction with NVIDIA, was how we were going to help organizations unlock the value of their data. Because ultimately, it's the data that's driving these AI outcomes.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Well, yeah, everything is fun and games until you add at scale at the end of the sentence, really. So Tony, let's talk about how to maximize AI investments and AI value from your perspective. And I'd like for you to actually focus on unified data management. And again, of course, the partnership and how's that working? How are you working together with NetApp? And what you're seeing, what you're hearing from customers in this context that we've just described?

Tony Paikeday

>> Yeah, it's a great question. If you think about the innovation that's happened at the model layer in AI, we have incredible deep reasoning models that can deliver very valuable answers. But I think what we're really realizing is that to derive ROI from this, AI needs to be more than great models. It needs to have data, data that feeds context, because without context, your AI models, your agents cannot understand your customers, your intellectual property, your culture, your unique vocabulary, so data matters more now than ever before. The problem is, almost 90% of enterprise data is unstructured. It's multimodal, it exists, strewn across the enterprise in probably multiple clouds, on-prem at the edge. And over decades, we've seen these silos emerge. So if you are trying to tap into this data to give your models more context, to give your agents the ability to give more insightful answers, you need to be able to act on that data and AI pre-process it, vectorize it, retrieve it where that data lives without proliferating more copies, more silos, more complexity. And I think this is why the partnership is so valuable, because we're bringing our technologies together to deliver an AI data platform that can solve this problem for enterprises.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Right. We heard about disaggregation, which is funny because, wow, that sounds like something I heard 25, 30 years ago. But it makes a lot of sense in the context of AI, which is what we've covered in other conversations earlier today. And I certainly agree, Tony, with your perspective. So now, there's data all over the place in silos. It may or may not be compliant, managed, governed. You need it to feed the beast, obviously, to get to the value that we described, and it needs to be managed and made secure in a process because there are lots of people going after it. And then the system itself has to be protected as well, which is another layer of complexity potentially. So in the context of the announcements from today, maybe you can just recap them for us, Russell, and then tell us how is that going to play out in your opinion, and why are they so meaningful?

Russell Fishman

>> Yeah, so look, you're absolutely right. Organizations are sitting on almost an untapped wealth of data. And to be clear, it's not just about the data itself, it's really about the inferred value of that data as well. So what's hidden away, locked behind the data? Folks talk about metadata. Metadata is the data about the data. And the reality is as the data support expands, the data about the data becomes almost more important than the data itself. So one of the things that the NVIDIA and NetApp have announced is our AI data engine that incorporates the NVIDIA AI data platform. And what that's doing is it's bringing some core NVIDIA technologies directly next to the data. And what that means is that we're actually able to make the data more valuable. Think about it as sort of refining the data into something that makes it more useful in the context of AI as Tony mentioned. What we recognize is that, yeah, it's complicated to bring all of this disparate data together in one place. There's a control plane. We obviously talked a lot about that today. We talked about the consistency of our capabilities across on-premises and across multiple clouds. We announced, for example, the ability to snap mirror and flex cache, create a single namespace across these environments. That's obviously super important. But for us, the most important part of today was that the AI data engine, again, embedding NVIDIA technology at the center of this, what we're able to do is to take that data and make it more useful, unlocking the latent value that's in that data and giving organizations an opportunity to actually succeed with AI.

Christophe Bertrand

>> So wouldn't you agree that maybe we should not be talking about storage anymore, but really more about a data platform just as George suggested? Because in the end, yes, of course, storage is more of a physical thing now. But in reality, data is managed, governed across all sorts of locations and storage and environments. And in your case, you are hyperscaler neutral as well, which is another part of the announcement I guess today. So is this a storage company anymore?

Russell Fishman

>> No, I think that's absolutely correct. I tend to think about moving storage. Storage, anyway, is moving from what we used to call retrieval-based systems to query-based systems. And the AI data engine, again, embedding NVIDIA GPUs at the center of that is allowing us to very quickly take that data in real time, vectorize it, make it available through a semantic query interface. That's both through data curation. So that means GUI that allows people to curate and create data sets, but also through open standards like A2A, which is an emerging standard, but allows us to essentially federate queries across an organization without having to centrally index them. I think what you're starting to see is a much more efficient way of delivering these reasoning models across an organization without having to centralize all the data and trying to keep all that data up to date and having these massive indexes that are just really, really difficult to run. So I think you're right. We're not talking about storage anymore, we're talking about data manageability, and I think NetApp has been on that path for many years with our fantastic relationship with NVIDIA. I think we're really accelerating that experience.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Absolutely. And really the fact that you can gather data from all sorts of sources wherever it lives really ... I think it lends a lot of credibility to the statements you've just made. And Tony, I mean, obviously, you're focused on this advanced compute component. Talk to us about the intelligent data architecture that has become so critical. What's your view on the combination and the partnership? And what do you expect to see in the next few years on the stopping? Because this is just the beginning, I imagine.

Tony Paikeday

>> Yeah, yeah. No, absolutely. Let me actually rewind a little bit to the earliest days of our partnership. You think about the very beginning of when enterprises started to deploy AI infrastructure. We launched the NVIDIA GTX 1, world's first AI supercomputer, and customers came to us and NetApp and said, "This infrastructure ..." Unless you're a hyperscaler, it's complex to design, it's lengthy to deploy, and it can be very complex to operate and scale. They said to us, "Make it simple, make it effortless to deploy fast, easy to manage." And that gave birth to things like ONTAP AI was incredible at integrated infrastructure solution. NetApp is a huge pedigree in this area of simplifying infrastructure. And over the years, they've been very successful. Our two technologies intertwined at the infrastructure layer. You saw the announcement today around AFX certified for DGX SuperPOD. SuperPOD is the canonical AI factory. It's also the blueprint on which all of our OEM partners are building their own factories for their customers. Now, the other part of the news, which we're very excited about is AI data engine, right? Because if you see what's happening, our co-engineering and our co-innovation is moving further and further up to the stack. So now, this is a full stack solution that goes everything from the infrastructure optimization all the way through the developer experience and workflow, taking the best of our stuff in NetApps, right? So you think about accelerated computing, Spectrum-X networking, NVIDIA AI Enterprise, NIMs microservices, retrieval, inline vectorization, guardrails for security, plus NetApp's, incredible data management features. If you think about data compression, policy-based workflow, role-based security, all of these things now come together in a turnkey AI appliance that we're very proud of that any enterprise can deploy wherever the data lives. So they don't have to proliferate copies or silos, but simply be able to act on the data and get real-time answers and insights. So we're very proud of how the innovation stack has been co-innovated at every layer now between our two companies.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Well, words of wisdom and more to come is what I'm hearing. So we'll probably have you back next year. Well, Tony and Russell, thank you so much for joining theCUBE and for your time. Great partnership. Great announcements. I'm sure you're going to be very busy here at NetApp INSIGHT. And to our viewers, NetApp INSIGHT 2025 live from Vegas. My name is Christophe Bertrand, Principal Analyst with theCUBE Research. Please stay tuned. We'll be right back.