SAN JOSE, CALIF. -- NetApp® (NASDAQ: NTAP), the intelligent data infrastructure company, today announced NetApp StorageGRID® 12.0, a scalable, software-defined object storage solution designed for unstructured data. This latest version of StorageGRID will introduce new capabilities designed to enhance AI initiatives, improve data security, and modernize organizations’ data infrastructure.

Whether businesses are in the early stages of modernizing their data lakes or experimenting with advanced AI applications, they need to manage and store exploding volumes of unstructured data such as text, video, machine and sensor data, server logs, and more. Businesses that want to tap into this growing ocean of data need a secure, cost-effective, and scalable solution, making object storage an essential component of their primary storage environment.

“As the proven industry leader in on-premises object storage, NetApp StorageGRID provides the scalability, cost-effectiveness, and performance needed to feed modern workloads like AI,” said Sandeep Singh, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Enterprise Storage at NetApp. “Our latest updates enable customers to grow their object-based data estates more securely and accelerate workloads so they can focus on putting their data to work.”

NetApp StorageGRID 12.0 introduces new features designed to strengthen object storage in customers’ intelligent data infrastructure, including:

· Improved Scaling for AI workloads: StorageGRID 12.0 includes new capabilities for advanced caching that improve the efficiency and scalability for AI training and other HPC workloads, boosting performance with up to 20x more throughput than before. Additionally, it supports versioning AI datasets with bucket branches. Customers can more easily iterate AI projects at scale, facilitate testing and development workflows, and make their data stores more resilient. This new feature enables users to quickly create space-efficient clones of their object storage buckets to use in their workflows and enable faster recovery in the face of disruption.
· Simplified management: StorageGRID 12.0 includes numerous enhancements ranging from better drive firmware upgrades to improved log archiving abilities that are designed to simplify the administrator experience. Administrators can automate drive firmware updates across all nodes, reducing manual labor spent on maintenance tasks.
· Enhanced cyber resiliency and security features: StorageGRID 12.0 includes updates that increase the security of object storage environments. The solution now supports enhanced encryption standards with AES GCM encryption add integrity checking, stronger on-disk encryption, and default blocking for SSH ports. Customers also more easily support immutable datasets for AI by leveraging the new support for object lock in cross-grid replication.