Intelligent data infrastructure is becoming critical as enterprises move artificial intelligence from curated pilots into production. NetApp Inc. is positioning its Novus architecture for that transition.

Ninety-three percent of organizations pursuing production AI identify data as their leading challenge, according to NetApp Chief Executive Officer George Kurian (pictured). Addressing the associated safety risks will require action from model builders, security vendors and enterprise operators.

“When you want to make AI scale across your enterprise, you need to integrate it into the operational systems and the workflows and how work gets done,” Kurian said. “That creates … new requirements on the infrastructure, like governance, security, control and so on.”

Kurian 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 production AI, data governance and NetApp’s infrastructure strategy. (* Disclosure below.)

Intelligent data infrastructure connects scale and governance

This week, NetApp introduced Novus, which combines its established data layer with an independently scalable metadata layer. It’s designed to deliver more than 100 terabytes per second and support zettabyte-scale capacity within one namespace.

“The combination of those allows you to meet the performance requirements of the most demanding enterprise,” Kurian said. “The metadata service becomes a place for data discovery, data cataloging, and data governance and control. Having a super scalable metadata service allows you to implement [the] guardrails we talked about earlier.”

Organizations can start small and expand to large AI factories on a consistent platform, according to Kurian. He framed intelligent data infrastructure as essential to creating trusted knowledge.

“I think that the AI era requires organizations to be really good stewards of their data, because data is the foundation for knowledge and knowledge is the intellectual property,” he said. “To have knowledge, you need really good intelligent data infrastructure that not only allows you to extract memory and context from your data, but also to keep it secure, well governed and a resource that you can trust.”

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