Enterprises sitting on decades of legacy information face a pressing question as artificial intelligence moves from pilots to production: Can that archive become AI-ready data without a costly rebuild of the infrastructure underneath it?

NetApp Inc. is betting it can answer that question with a platform that reaches well beyond its storage roots. The company is framing its intelligent data infrastructure strategy around a simple promise: Make data usable for AI where it already lives, according to Jen Prenner (pictured), senior vice president of product marketing at NetApp.

“For data to be usable for AI, it needs to be accessible, governed, protected, available,” Prenner said. “You need to be able to do that with all that data for your projects without re-architecting the data or moving it.”

Prenner spoke with theCUBE Research’s Christophe Bertrand and co-host Rebecca Knight at NetApp INSIGHT, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed making legacy enterprise data usable for AI, unified storage and built-in data protection. (* Disclosure below.)

Building AI-ready data without new silos

Making legacy data usable for AI requires support for different types of storage. NetApp’s unified approach spans file, block and object storage, Prenner explained. The company also announced plans for a fully managed storage service on Oracle Corp.’s cloud infrastructure, available within the next 12 months.

“Whether you want to store your data on the cloud, at the edge, or on-prem, or some combination of all three, which is what most customers do, we feel like allowing a unified strategy to take hold is how you access all of that data without creating that complexity, without creating more silos,” she said.

Protection must be built into every layer rather than bolted on, according to Prenner. NetApp combines its own data protection tools with an expanded partnership with Commvault Systems Inc. Its Console control plane also supports local deployment for environments that must remain disconnected from the cloud.

“Your fleet manageability, your observability, reporting, analytics, remediation — all of that can be done with Console within one tool,” she said. “So you don’t have to have separate teams, separate tools, which end up costing a lot of money.”

Storage remains the foundation of NetApp’s platform. Protection, control planes and data services build on that foundation to help enterprises put AI-ready data to use, according to Prenner.

“What we want folks to understand is that NetApp is far more than your storage provider,” she said. “We have 30 years of trust with our customers, but we also have a lot more so that customers can take their AI ambitions and turn them into something that’s real.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of NetApp INSIGHT:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for NetApp INSIGHT. Neither NetApp, the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE