NetApp and NVIDIA have announced an innovative collaboration today that aims to enhance retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for generative AI applications. This new integration aspires to securely "unlock exabytes of data for private generative AI across the hybrid multicloud."

The partnership will link NVIDIA’s recently launched NeMo Retriever microservices to an immense volume of data on NetApp’s intelligent data infrastructure. As a result, every NetApp ONTAP customer will gain the ability to directly communicate with their data while deriving exclusive business insights. Importantly, this direct interaction will not compromise the security and privacy of their data.

Historically, companies desiring to create internal chatbots, co-pilots, and applications utilising corporate knowledge faced considerable complexities, particularly over concern about maintaining data security and privacy. With the new development, enterprises can safely leverage publicly available large language models to speak directly to their corporate data, secure in the knowledge that their private data will remain inaccessible outside the enterprise.

The advanced solution incorporating NVIDIA NeMo Retriever microservices technology supports any data stored on NetApp ONTAP, whether on-premises or in public cloud systems. NetApp customers can now query their data — encompassing everything from spreadsheets and documents to technical drawings and materials in their ERP or CRM systems — via simple prompts. Crucially, all this occurs while upholding the access control standards established during the data storage process.

NetApp CEO George Kurian stated, “As the leader in unstructured data management, NetApp makes data infrastructure intelligent to securely turbocharge AI innovation. Together with NVIDIA, we have helped accelerate over 500 data-driven businesses to become AI-ready. AI is defining a new data-driven era, and NetApp and NVIDIA are at the forefront of ensuring success for customers as they adopt and deploy AI.”

The alliance between NVIDIA’s NeMo Retriever and NetApp ONTAP will enable enterprises both on-premises and in the largest public clouds to access their data anywhere it is stored. This will significantly reduce friction, cost, and time to value for RAG. “Together, NVIDIA and NetApp can help enterprises build accurate, intelligent generative AI applications that let companies talk to their data — and foster a new wave of business opportunity,” commented Jensen Huang, Founder and CEO at NVIDIA.

The development complements NetApp's robust array of mature AI services, which have been utilised by over 500 of their joint customers for AI model training and inference, including solutions built on NVIDIA DGX BasePOD and NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD.