NetApp Inc. is announcing new security features in its data storage and management systems that improve data protection and security in artificial intelligence use cases, focusing on ransomware.

Citing its NetApp 2023 Data Complexity report, NetApp said 87% of senior executives ranked ransomware as a high or the top priority for their organization. The vendor responds with improved detection and recovery features across its product line.

ONTAP Autonomous Ransomware Protection with Artificial Intelligence provides improved accuracy and performance when detecting and mitigating new and sophisticated cyber threats in storage managed by the vendor’s ONTAP data management software. The system uses adaptive machine learning models built into enterprise primary storage to look at file-level signals in real-time and even previously unknown ransomware attacks with over 99% precision, the company said. The first technology preview will be available within the next quarter.

NetApp BlueXP ransomware protection provides a single control plane to coordinate a complete workload-centric ransomware defense. It offers one-click workload data protection, can automatically detect and respond to a potential attack and recovers workloads within minutes. The software is now in public preview.

Application-aware ransomware protection in the SnapCenter 5.0 backup management software provides SnapCenter 5.0 supports ONTAP features like tamperproof snapshot copy locking, volumes protected by the company’s SnapLock compliance protection software and SnapMirror data replication for applications and virtual machines. SnapCenter 5.0 supports the protection of applications on-premises with NetApp AFF flash storage arrays, all-flash storage-area network arrays and NetApp Fiber-Attached Storage as well as in the cloud with Microsoft Corp.’s Azure NetApp Files and Amazon Web Services Inc.’s FSx for ONTAP.

NetApp BlueXP Disaster Recovery integrates with VMware Inc. virtual in both on-premises and public cloud environments. NetApp said this eliminates the need for separate standby disaster recovery infrastructure, reducing costs and provides simplified failover and fail-back processes that smooth transitions from on-premises VMware infrastructure to the public cloud.

NetApp also said it’s extending its Ransomware Recovery Guarantee to its Keystone storage-as-a-service offering. The vendor said it would warrant snapshot data recovery in the event of a ransomware attack and offer some compensation if snapshot data copies can’t be recovered.

In other AI-related announcements, NetApp said its AIPod converged infrastructure is now certified under Nvidia Corp.’s BasePOD reference architecture for AI development using Nvidia’s DGX H100 graphics processing units attached to NetApp AFF C-Series flash systems.

New AI reference architectures for the FlexPod converged infrastructure jointly developed by NetApp and Cisco Systems Inc. now support the Nvidia AI Enterprise software platform. FlexPod for AI can now be extended to Red Hat Inc.’s OpenShift and SUSE Linux GmbH Rancher container management platform. New scaling and benchmarking features support increasingly GPU-intensive applications.

Image: NetApp