NetApp and Oracle Put ONTAP Natively Inside OCI as NetApp Adds Agent Guardrails

Pravjit Tiwana, NetApp's senior vice president and general manager of cloud storage and services, said in an interview with theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media's livestreaming studio, that the product was co-engineered and co-developed with Oracle. "As far as our partnership, this is a co-engineered and co-developed product of ours," Tiwana said. "It's not like we have taken it and bolted it in OCI, but both [Oracle] and our organizations have worked very closely to have a deep integration into [the] control plane, data plane, as well as to the OCI's native billing infrastructure, to provisioning, to console, to API."

Konstantinos Papamiltiadis, senior vice president of partnerships at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, said customers using the OCI console can select ONTAP as a native service. He said the operational goal was to bring everything under one interface. "For me, the most important thing that we managed to build is, from an operational perspective, we bring everything under one single interface that provides simplicity and consistency," Papamiltiadis said.

The companies plan to co-sell the service, drawing on NetApp's experience with other hyperscalers, according to Tiwana. He said customers running applications or systems on premises with ONTAP can move them to OCI without redesigning applications. "If you have applications or systems running on-prem, you bring it to OCI with ONTAP, you don't have to do anything. It works as seamlessly as it was working on-prem," he said.

Tiwana said NetApp and Oracle also plan to work together to bring Oracle's AI efforts into ONTAP so customers do not have to move data elsewhere. "They can run the AI right where the data lives," he said.

At the same event, NetApp said it is moving access controls away from simple yes-or-no permissions and toward policies based on behavior, according to Russell Fishman, senior director of global AI solutions and field activation. Fishman said the shift reflects the difference between human users and autonomous agents. "This is an agent. Agents don't think the same way. They're not acting the same way," he said.

NetApp's autonomous ransomware protection service uses AI to detect and block attacks, and a newly announced integration feeds those signals into recovery workflows from Commvault Systems Inc., Fishman said. NetApp has built similar links with Microsoft Corp.'s Sentinel and Cisco Systems Inc.'s Splunk. "We become an indicator of compromise," he said. "We can actually detect things and tell Commvault, 'hey, there's a problem,' and vice versa."

New features in NetApp's AI Data Engine, which prepares and governs enterprise data for AI, include a behavior-based policy engine that flags unusual patterns of data use, Fishman said. He described an example in which an agent accesses all customer accounts rather than one. "I would expect you to look at maybe one customer's account, not all of the customers' accounts," he said. "That seems a bit weird to me."

Fishman said responding at the speed of AI means organizations cannot always keep a human in the loop, so automation has to carry more of the load. AI Data Engine can be deployed against any existing NetApp system, and NetApp announced a free six-month offer at the event. "If I was an ONTAP admin — if I was a NetApp customer — that's the first thing I'd be doing," Fishman said. "I want to lock this down now. The risk of not doing so, not just from a lack of innovation, but the risk of misuse of data, the lack of control, it's too great."

NetApp also announced Novus, a new storage architecture for AI factories and neoclouds, during the event.