NetApp Hands Storage Operations to AI Agents, With Humans Setting the Boundaries

The hybrid cloud tools, delivered through NetApp Console, let customers set policies and boundaries across their storage fleets while agents keep infrastructure running inside those limits. Sandeep Singh, senior vice president and general manager of enterprise storage at NetApp, and Helen Yu, founder and chief executive of Tigon Advisory, described the shift in an interview with theCUBE Research's Christophe Bertrand and co-host Rebecca Knight on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media's livestreaming studio.

Singh said customers will keep spreading workloads across locations of their own choosing, and that the priority is a single data foundation that behaves the same way everywhere. "We know that the customers are going to use a variety of locations for the right fit for them," he said, according to SiliconANGLE. "What becomes fundamentally important for customers is to have a consistent data infrastructure strategy that underpins it all so that they can get a consistent set of data capabilities combined with a consistent operational experience across the various environments."

Yu argued that the obstacle is organizational rather than technical. Teams that cannot consistently reach trusted data stop making decisions and start building workarounds, which is how shadow AI and shadow IT take hold, she said. "It's not a storage problem. It's a leadership and accountability issue," Yu said.

On the infrastructure side, NetApp's autonomous controls are designed to act without waiting for a human to respond. In one keynote demonstration, agents caught a nighttime performance anomaly instead of paging an engineer, Singh said. "Agents can in real time implement the necessary quality of service rules to ensure there's compliance to the boundary conditions there," he said. "And that way, no human is woken up. The right outcome is achieved and there's no noisy neighbor effect. And there's an audit trail presented to the humans for going and following up."

Yu cautioned that automation alone does not amount to governance. Letting an algorithm decide is not a governance model, she said, and leaders should measure automation against business outcomes rather than the number of tasks removed. She proposed extending the RACI framework, which assigns responsible, accountable, consulted and informed roles, to machines. "Now you need to incorporate the machine or agents into your RACI chart. Who owns what data? Who has access to what data?" she said. "And then when you're going to make an exception, who has the right to override the exception?"

TheCUBE is a paid media partner for NetApp INSIGHT. According to the disclosure accompanying the broadcast, neither NetApp nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.