In a significant boost to Malaysia's goal of becoming the AI hub of Southeast Asia, NetApp, a leader in intelligent data infrastructure, has announced new developments aimed at accelerating artificial intelligence (AI) innovation within the country. By providing essential data infrastructure for generative AI (GenAI), NetApp empowers Malaysian organisations to harness one of the most transformative technologies of recent years.

"Malaysia has made significant strides in becoming the AI hub of Southeast Asia," said Alwyn David, Country Manager, Malaysia, NetApp (pic).

"Building a robust, intelligent data infrastructure is key for organisations to overcome data challenges and drive AI innovation. With NetApp's latest innovations, we are positioned to empower Malaysian organisations to unlock the full value of data with AI and achieve their strategic goals."

GenAI powers practical business applications such as content generation, summarising vast information, and interactive Q&A sessions. Gartner predicts that spending on AI software will reach $297.9 billion by 2027, with GenAI accounting for over one-third of this investment. Success in the AI era hinges on mastering data that is governable, trusted, and traceable.

At the NetApp INSIGHT 2024 conference, CEO George Kurian outlined a vision for data intelligence in the AI age. He emphasised that AI challenges are fundamentally data challenges and showcased how intelligent data infrastructure can secure, govern, and continually update relevant data to fuel a unified GenAI stack. They include:

• NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD Storage Certification for NetApp ONTAP: NetApp is undergoing NVIDIA certification for its ONTAP storage system on the AFF A90 platform with NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD AI infrastructure. This will enable Malaysian organisations to utilise advanced data management for large-scale AI projects, addressing challenges associated with large language models (LLMs) without compromising data management during AI training.
• Global Metadata Namespace: The creation of a global metadata namespace allows secure exploration and management of data across hybrid multi-cloud environments. This facilitates feature extraction and data classification for AI applications, providing Malaysian businesses with the tools to innovate securely and efficiently. NetApp also announced integration with NVIDIA AI software to enhance enterprise retrieval augmented generation (RAG) for agentic AI.
• Integrated AI Data Pipeline: NetApp ONTAP now offers an integrated AI data pipeline that automates the preparation of unstructured data for AI. It captures incremental changes, performs policy-driven data classification and anonymisation, generates compressible vector embeddings, and stores them in a vector database. This enables high-scale, low-latency semantic searches and RAG inferencing, allowing Malaysian organisations to accelerate AI deployment.
• Disaggregated Storage Architecture: A new storage architecture allows full sharing of the storage backend, maximising network and flash speeds while reducing infrastructure costs. It improves performance for compute-intensive AI workloads like LLM training and conserves rack space and power—benefits that are particularly valuable for Malaysian enterprises looking to optimise resources. Integrated into NetApp ONTAP, it retains the system's resiliency, data management, security, and governance features.
• Enhanced Native Cloud Services: NetApp is enhancing its native cloud services by providing an integrated data platform for data ingestion, discovery, and cataloguing. The company is developing data processing services for data visualisation, preparation, and transformation. Prepared datasets can be securely shared and utilised with cloud providers' AI and machine learning services, including third-party solutions. NetApp plans to integrate Google Cloud NetApp Volumes as a data store for BigQuery and Vertex AI, offering Malaysian businesses seamless cloud integration.

"Organisations of all sizes in Malaysia are experimenting with GenAI to increase efficiency and accelerate innovation," said David. "By providing secure, scalable, and high-performance intelligent data infrastructure that integrates with other industry-leading platforms, NetApp helps Malaysian customers overcome barriers to implementing GenAI."

Meanwhile the company has also realised collaborations in the AI ecosystem. They include:

• Domino Data Lab Partnership: Domino Data Lab has selected Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP as the storage foundation for Domino Datasets in the Domino Cloud platform. This choice offers cost-effective performance and scalability, accelerating model development—a benefit that can extend to Malaysian organisations utilising Domino's solutions. Additionally, Domino and NetApp are collaborating to integrate Domino's MLOps platform directly with NetApp ONTAP, simplifying data management for AI workloads.
• Availability of AIPod with Lenovo for NVIDIA OVX: The NetApp AIPod with Lenovo ThinkSystem servers for NVIDIA OVX, announced in May 2024, is now generally available. This solution is designed for enterprises aiming to leverage generative AI and RAG capabilities to enhance productivity, streamline operations, and unlock new revenue opportunities—a significant advantage for Malaysian businesses seeking growth.
• Enhanced FlexPod AI Features: NetApp is introducing new features for its FlexPod AI solution, a hybrid infrastructure platform that accelerates modern workloads. By combining Cisco compute and networking with NetApp storage, FlexPod AI simplifies, automates, and secures AI applications. Malaysian organisations can benefit from lower costs, efficient scaling, faster time to value, and reduced risks.

"Implementing AI requires finely tuned technology infrastructure working in harmony," said Mike Leone, Practice Director, Data Analytics & AI at Enterprise Strategy Group. "By collaborating with other industry-leading vendors, NetApp ensures that compute, networking, storage, and AI software solutions integrate seamlessly to drive AI innovation—an assurance that is invaluable for Malaysian enterprises embarking on their AI journey."