NetApp has unveiled a new high-performance file system designed for data centre infrastructure.

NetApp's new Novus file system is claimed to be the fastest on the planet, purpose-built for streaming massive data volumes to GPUs for AI workloads. Announced at NetApp Insight, Novus features disaggregated metadata and data servers, separating metadata from the data path so performance, capacity, and concurrency can scale independently under a single namespace using industry-standard NFS. The Novus file system targets Neoclouds and GPU-as-a-Service providers building AI factories, positioning NetApp to compete directly with specialized high-performance AI storage suppliers including DDN, Everpure, WEKA, and VAST Data.

NetApp Chief Product Officer Syam Nair said: "HPC-era storage alone cannot serve AI Factory scale—the industry needs a true architecture built for it from the ground up. AI factories have long been searching for infrastructure that can scale at AI speed. Leveraging the power of the NetApp Platform, Novus delivers 100 TB/sec of unlimited scale-out performance, leapfrogging the market to serve as the new high-performance, AI-scale storage architecture that unlocks the performance of millions of GPUs and delivers the return on investment needed to sustain the next wave of AI innovation. We've just delivered the fastest storage on the planet, purpose built for the AI Era."

NetApp claims Novus supports zettabyte scale and can keep hundreds of thousands of GPUs continuously fed with data. The initial release combines Novus Data Director, which manages metadata software running on qualified Supermicro infrastructure, with ONTAP data services delivered through AFF A90 systems. Novus is engineered to exceed 100 TB/sec bandwidth while supporting high utilization of hundreds of thousands of GPUs while maintaining ONTAP enterprise data services.

ONTAP on AFF systems (A800, A90, and similar) has supported GPU Direct Storage via NFS over RDMA since ONTAP 9.12.1, with published results including approximately 171 GiB/s (A800) and 351 GiB/s (A90 cluster). NetApp AFX (disaggregated ONTAP for AI) is certified for Nvidia DGX SuperPOD and has achieved 457 GiB/s sustained throughput across eight AFX nodes. When asked whether Novus supports GPU Direct Storage via NFS over RDMA, pNFS, and session trunking, Arindam Banerjee, Chief Platform and Technology Officer at NetApp, replied: "NetApp Novus is built on industry standard pNFS protocols so it is not limited to any particular GPU architecture."

**Keystone Sovereign**

NetApp's Keystone subscription service now includes Keystone Sovereign, addressing European customers' evolving data sovereignty requirements that extend beyond data residency to encompass operational access, telemetry, and data flow transparency. The new offering includes European-based data residency for customer data, logs, backups, and telemetry where applicable; European-based support and escalation paths; European-controlled access and management processes; clear documentation of telemetry, monitoring, and data flows; and contractual and legal structures reinforcing sovereignty expectations.

Ivan Iannaccone, VP and GM of Keystone at NetApp, said: "With NetApp Keystone Sovereign, we are helping qualified European customers address these evolving expectations with additional regional, support, access, and data-handling controls designed to build trust and keep critical data and support within defined geographic boundaries."

Initial pilots will be available for Germany and France, with additional countries planned.

**Fleet Management and Console Operations**

NetApp Console now provides two delivery models for unified system administration across on-premises and cloud environments. Console Fleet Management enables customers to manage their entire infrastructure as a single entity, delivering fleet-level observability and AI-driven control. Console Autonomous Operations deliver AI-assisted operations with human oversight, helping administrators predict issues, resolve incidents faster, and optimize capacity and costs through agentic AI-driven orchestration and API-accessible functions. A new Console AI ChatOps Interface replaces manual workflows with a conversational interface, reducing the burden on enterprise administrators managing fragmented tools across hybrid fleets. The ChatOps interface delivers autonomous storage operations, intent-based provisioning, and policy guardrails across ONTAP storage systems, along with AI-powered reporting, predictive analytics, and automated remediation through an open LLM gateway using customers' own LLM while maintaining defined storage classes, policies, and governance boundaries.

Sandeep Singh, NetApp SVP and GM of Platform, said: "Customers should not have to choose between the performance and control of on-premises infrastructure and the flexibility of cloud. With these new hybrid multi-cloud capabilities, NetApp is helping enterprises break down the borders between environments, operate with greater autonomy, and put efficiency, sovereignty, and control at the center of their data strategy."

**AI Data Engine Expansion**

NetApp's AI Data Engine (AIDE) provides an AI-focused ETL pipeline for making AFX-stored data deliverable to and usable by large language models and AI agents. AIDE discovers and characterizes data across a customer's NetApp data estate, both on-premises and across the three major public clouds, with metadata updated as new data arrives or old data is deleted.

The updated AIDE expands metadata discovery across the full enterprise data estate, including NetApp ONTAP, StorageGRID, and non-NetApp storage. This enables customers to discover and understand data across NFS, SMB, and S3 repositories, reducing security risk, optimizing storage, accelerating data migrations, and identifying AI-ready data. NetApp is previewing expanded AI-powered data understanding capabilities, deeper governance intelligence, open analytics integrations with platforms including Starburst and Onehouse.AI, and new agentic services designed to help enterprises securely transform data into actionable AI context at scale.

**Partnership Updates**

NetApp announced expanded collaborations with Commvault, Nutanix, Oracle, SAP, and Supermicro. The Nutanix partnership enables virtual machine and containerized workloads to benefit from ONTAP storage and its enterprise features. NetApp and Oracle announced a new, fully managed, OCI-native storage service bringing ONTAP data management capabilities natively to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, paralleling existing implementations for AWS, Azure, and GCP. The partnership helps enterprises migrate, run, protect, and modernize databases, enterprise applications, virtualized environments, EDA/HPC, regulated applications, and AI data pipelines.