NetApp Places Sovereign Storage at Center of European Infrastructure Decisions

Hendrickx said sovereignty now covers much more than where data is physically stored. Customers want to know who operates and manages it, where support is based and what telemetry is collected, he said. “What [our customers] really want is a cloud-like experience but having control of their data,” Hendrickx said. “Sovereignty is not only a legal discussion, but it’s actually an architectural design and an operational decision more than anything else.”

Many customers still buy capital equipment on five-year cycles because they know what their demand will be, Hendrickx explained. A growing number need infrastructure that follows the business instead, with predictable cost, availability, performance and growth. NetApp’s new Keystone Sovereign service gives qualified European customers data sovereignty controls, and local partners can build it into their own sovereign offerings.

Hendrickx said storage-as-a-service is often mistaken for a payment model. “There’s sometimes a little bit of a thinking that as a service is more like a payment model,” he said. “It’s way more than that. It’s really a business decision.”

Enterprises face a different AI problem than the neoclouds building GPU gigafactories across Europe, he said. Most have decades of data spread across countries and clouds. NetApp is pitching its Novus architecture and wider data infrastructure as the way to make that data AI-ready. “If you don’t do that, you see a lot of AI pilots, but they never get in production,” Hendrickx said. “And you can only do that when you really make everything AI-ready.”

Fragmentation makes the problem worse, according to Hendrickx. AI, on-premises systems, software as a service and cloud often run as separate operating models with separate teams, which leaves AI projects stranded on islands, he said. NetApp’s Keystone storage-as-a-service platform can help unify those operating models and shift the focus toward business outcomes.

“I really believe you’re going to have more grip on your business because you’re going to reduce cost and you’re going to focus on business outcomes and you’re going to drive innovation,” Hendrickx said. “We need to be way more innovative than we have been.”

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