NetApp이 인공지능 스토리지 인프라 역량을 확대하기 위해 PEAK 인수를 발표했습니다.
NetApp has announced plans to acquire PEAK, a Manchester, U.K.-based AI storage software company, to expand its infrastructure capabilities for large-scale artificial intelligence workloads. Financial terms were not disclosed. The transaction remains subject to customary closing conditions and regulatory approvals.
The acquisition brings PEAK's metadata architecture and high-performance parallel file system technology into NetApp's data infrastructure portfolio. NetApp plans to combine these capabilities with its ONTAP software to create storage architecture capable of supporting trillions of files, multi-exabyte environments, and increasingly large GPU clusters.
AI infrastructure requirements are placing greater pressure on conventional enterprise storage architectures. AI training and inference environments generate highly parallel data access patterns, requiring storage systems to serve growing numbers of GPUs without allowing data availability or metadata processing to become a performance bottleneck. NetApp's approach separates metadata services from the underlying data, allowing metadata capacity and performance to scale independently. PEAK's technology is expected to accelerate that strategy by adding specialized metadata services, a global namespace, and parallel NFS-based access for highly parallel workloads.
"AI clouds need high-performance shared storage that can scale alongside growing GPU clusters while maintaining the resilience, security, and operational simplicity organizations depend on," NetApp CEO George Kurian said. "With PEAK, we are delivering on our vision for a new generation of AI infrastructure that combines scalable metadata services with the proven foundation of ONTAP."
PEAK develops software-defined storage designed specifically for AI and data-intensive computing. Its platform operates on industry-standard hardware and scales from a single server to exabyte-level environments. The company's technology originated through work involving Los Alamos National Laboratory and Carnegie Mellon University. PEAK deployments include NHS AIDE, Oxford Robotics Institute, University of Liverpool, University of Strathclyde MediForge Hub, and the Zoological Society of London.
NetApp plans to integrate PEAK's metadata technology with ONTAP while maintaining an evolution path for existing ONTAP customers, giving enterprises access to higher levels of AI-oriented file scalability without abandoning data management, resilience, and security capabilities already built into NetApp's platform.
"What excites us most about joining NetApp is the opportunity to pair our culture of innovation with the reach, scale, and customer trust of a global leader," PEAK founder and Chief Technology Officer Mark Klarzynski said. "Together with NetApp, we have an opportunity to help shape that future and deliver technologies that make managing data at a massive scale both practical and accessible."
A key technical priority of the combined architecture will be scaling metadata independently as file counts and GPU deployments increase. Metadata—which contains information about files and their organization—can become an infrastructure constraint as AI environments grow to extremely large numbers of files and simultaneous data requests. PEAK's architecture increases metadata scale while providing a global namespace and standards-based parallel NFS access. NetApp intends to pair these capabilities with ONTAP as the underlying resilient data foundation. The resulting architecture is designed for trillions of files and multi-exabyte deployments.
As enterprises and cloud providers deploy larger GPU clusters, compute capacity can sit idle when storage systems cannot deliver data at the required speed. NetApp said its approach could help reduce data-related GPU stalls by improving how quickly large compute clusters can access shared information, potentially increasing utilization of costly AI infrastructure. Storage performance and metadata management have become important components of overall AI infrastructure efficiency.
For NetApp, PEAK also adds specialized engineering and intellectual property developed specifically for high-performance AI storage while allowing the larger company to bring those capabilities to its global enterprise customer base. NetApp has spent more than three decades developing enterprise data and storage technologies, with ONTAP serving as a core component of its current data platform. The company has increasingly oriented that platform toward AI workloads through technologies including its AI Data Engine and AFX. This planned acquisition extends that strategy deeper into the architecture supporting massive parallel workloads.