NetApp Enhances Support for AI Workloads at Massive Scale

NetApp® (NASDAQ: NTAP), the Intelligent Data Infrastructure company, today announced the release of StorageGRID 12.1, designed to help customers scale AI and other modern workloads with a federated global namespace. The new capabilities improve how data is accessed, processed, and managed across distributed environments to support AI data pipelines, data lakes, and modern object-based applications.

Organizations are contending with rapid growth in unstructured data to serve AI workloads while also managing that data across increasingly distributed hybrid environments. In its Object Storage Solutions Landscape, Q1 2026 report, Forrester notes that the rise of generative AI has pushed object storage further into an AI‑optimized data platform beyond its historical uses supporting enterprise data strategies with scalable, durable storage for unstructured data, media, and backups. The updates to NetApp StorageGRID enable organizations to leverage their object data for these emerging uses with new capabilities that simplify operations, improve performance, and reduce costs for data-intensive workloads such as AI.

“As organizations race to turn rapidly growing and distributed volumes of unstructured data into insight and action, they need infrastructure that makes data intelligent, accessible, and ready for AI,” said Sandeep Singh, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Platform at NetApp. “With StorageGRID 12.1, NetApp is extending the power of our data platform, giving customers a globally unified namespace to manage data at scale, accelerate AI and analytics workloads, and extract more value from their data wherever it lives.”

StorageGRID 12.1 enables organizations to scale AI and modern workloads across globally distributed environments with new capabilities including:

• Global Federated Namespace: Customers can now operate at massive scale without rearchitecting applications or workflows with the introduction of federated namespaces. Federated namespaces enable management of multiple globally-distributed StorageGRID systems scaling up to 10 Exabytes in a single namespace.
• Large Performance, Efficiency, and Data Management Improvements: Helping customers reduce compute costs and improve efficiency of modern workloads, StorageGRID 12.1 delivers up to 400 percent higher throughput compared to 12.0 depending on workload and object size. With the performance enhancements, StorageGRID can now deliver up to 12 TB/s of throughput to AI Factories. Batch operations allow customers to easily execute operations on billions of objects. New capabilities enable AI agents to easily track changes to object storage buckets since the last scan, enhancing the ability to build comprehensive AI data pipelines.
• Expanded security and governance capabilities: Stronger controls for regulated environments help enable customers to accelerate innovation while protecting their data with multi-admin verification.

Recognizing NetApp among top object storage solutions, Forrester named NetApp a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Object Storage Solutions, Q2 2026. According to the report, "NetApp has a compelling vision of enterprise data infrastructure optimized for hybrid, multicloud, and sovereign use cases," and is "a strong fit for large enterprises managing distributed, regulated object estates that want to balance governance and hybrid consistency against the need for AI-native storage services." This is Forrester's inaugural Wave evaluation of the object storage market.

Additional Resources

• StorageGRID Optimize Your Data with Modern Object Storage

Forrester does not endorse any company, product, brand, or service included in its research publications and does not advise any person to select the products or services of any company or brand based on the ratings included in such publications. Information is based on the best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. This report is part of a broader collection of Forrester resources, including interactive models, frameworks, tools, data, and access to analyst guidance. For more information, read about Forrester’s objectivity here.

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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