Jointly validated solutions combine compute, networking and data management to improve GPU utilization and data governance.
NetApp announced a strategic collaboration with Supermicro to deliver jointly validated AI infrastructure solutions spanning large-scale AI factories, enterprise deployments, neoclouds, and sovereign AI initiatives. By combining Supermicro’s AI-optimized compute and rack-scale systems with the NetApp Platform, the companies will help customers accelerate deployment, improve GPU utilization, strengthen data governance, and reduce operational complexity.
NetApp and Supermicro are creating a full-stack foundation for AI that extends beyond high-performance storage. The collaboration brings together Supermicro’s rack-scale compute, networking, power, and liquid-cooling expertise with the NetApp Platform’s unified data management, cyber resilience, hybrid-cloud leadership, and disaggregated scale. Customers gain an architecture that can be deployed quickly, evolve across generations of compute, and deliver a consistent data experience from enterprise environments to the world’s largest AI factories. Because the compute and data infrastructure are tested and validated as a unified system, customers can shorten design and integration cycles, reduce deployment risk, and move AI environments into production faster.
The collaboration will make it faster and easier for customers to build Intelligent Data Infrastructure powered by the NetApp Platform in demanding AI factory environments. By pairing AI-optimized compute with AI-ready data services, NetApp and Supermicro will deliver jointly validated solutions organized around three core capabilities:
- Integrated AI Solutions at Scale: Supermicro’s AI-optimized servers, GPU platforms, and rack-scale systems combine with the NetApp Platform to deliver a validated solution for AI deployments ranging from individual enterprise AI projects to full AI factories, gigafactories, and sovereign AI initiatives.
- Enterprise-Grade Data Management, Security, and Sovereignty: The joint solutions are expected to deliver the governance, cyber resilience, and compliance that enterprises, governments, neoclouds, and GPU-as-a-service providers require, so customers can scale AI while keeping maintaining strong governance and control over their data.
- Maximized AI Investment ROI Through AI-Ready Data: The collaboration removes data bottlenecks to keep GPUs supplied with high-performance access to data for training, inference, and retrieval-augmented generation. Customers will spend less time waiting on data and instead spend more time training models.
The collaboration also enables customers to scale compute and data independently as workload needs change, improving infrastructure efficiency and preserving flexibility across the AI lifecycle. Customers adopting the joint solution will be able to securely access and manage data across on-premises and cloud environments, bringing AI infrastructure to the data while maintaining consistent governance and protection.
To simplify the customer deployment and operations of NetApp Novus architecture, NetApp and Supermicro will deliver NetApp Novus Data Director software running on qualified Supermicro servers with NetApp AFF A90 systems as the high-performance ONTAP data layer. By separating the metadata and data planes, NetApp Novus enables each to scale independently within a single namespace, helping AI infrastructure providers expand performance and capacity as their environments grow without repeatedly redesigning the underlying architecture. This initial implementation is the first step in a broader collaboration to co-engineer integrated infrastructure solutions for enterprise AI, neocloud, sovereign AI, and large-scale AI factory environments.
NetApp and Supermicro are also collaborating to support enterprises building a private AI platform with NetApp AIPod with Supermicro, a NetApp-validated converged infrastructure architecture based on the NVIDIA Reference Architecture guidance. Validated as a complete system and delivered through NetApp’s ecosystem of channel partners, this solution gives enterprises proven guidance for AI training, inference, and agentic workloads from dozens to hundreds of GPUs.
For more information, visit netapp.com.
