NetApp unveils data management vision

NetApp, the intelligent data infrastructure company, has introduced its data platform vision at INSIGHT Xtra Singapore 2026. The strategy aims to support ASEAN businesses on AI innovation.

The company noted that ASEAN is approaching an inflection point, where AI investment is growing faster than overall digital spending. In fact, AI adoption is expected to lift the region’s GDP by nearly US$1 T by 2030. Across ASEAN, enterprises operate within fragmented regulatory environments and varying levels of cloud maturity, making hybrid and local architectures the default standard. Key sectors such as financial services, healthcare, and the public sector are under increasing pressure to deploy AI systems that deliver real-time insights while adhering to sovereignty and governance requirements.

Scaling AI in this region demands more than just raw performance; it requires infrastructure that is resilient, governed, and economically sustainable, ensuring that data estate sprawl does not become a barrier to innovation, NetApp said. NetApp's data management strategy is designed to help enterprises move AI from initial pilots to large-scale production without sacrificing governance or operational stability, while obtaining the results that they are looking for. 

 "2026 is shaping up to be the year of 'production AI' for ASEAN. However, the reality for businesses here is that they are facing an uphill task of scaling workloads across complex environments, getting their data AI-ready, protecting their data from cyberthreats while complying with sovereignty regulations," said Henry Kho, Area VP & GM, GCASK (Greater China, ASEAN & South Korea), NetApp. 

"With the NetApp data platform, we are committed to helping enterprises build a robust intelligent data infrastructure that is embedded with governance and cyber resilience at the data layer. This gives ASEAN business leaders the confidence to harness the power of their data to the fullest to drive transformation in their industries and the world." 

The enterprise-grade NetApp data platform combines data storage, data management services and a metadata engine. 

To address the challenges of scaling AI in a resource-constrained and regulated region, NetApp has introduced new innovations to support intelligent data infrastructure, including the NetApp AFX systems and the NetApp AI Data Engine. These products are designed to unify data estates and ensure consistent operation across hybrid environments, with capabilities including:  

- Enterprise-grade disaggregated storage with exabyte-scale capacity: NetApp AFX storage was designed for demanding AI workloads and enables organisations to independently scale capacity and performance as needed, leading to cost efficiencies and better resource utilisation. 

Built on NetApp ONTAP, AFX delivers proven, enterprise-grade data management and security features for enterprise AI. Useful for demanding AI workloads, NetApp AFX systems can scale linearly up to 128 nodes with TBs per second of bandwidth, allowing for massive data management capabilities.  

- Making data ready for AI, ensuring it is always current: The NetApp AI Data Engine (AIDE), built leveraging the NVIDIA AI Data Platform reference design, features NVIDIA accelerated computing, networking and NVIDIA AI Enterprise software suite. This platform provides semantic search, data vectorisation, and data guardrails to simplify the entire AI data pipeline by collapsing multiple data preparation and management steps. Through data change detection and data synchronisation, NetApp AIDE eliminates redundant copies and keeps the data up to date. 

- Supporting the most demanding AI workloads: NetApp AFX is certified storage for NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD AI supercomputing, removing data bottlenecks while processing hundreds of billions of parameters for model training and real-time inference workloads, achieving extremely high data throughput.  

- Providing the most secure storage on the planet: NetApp’s recently-enhanced NetApp Ransomware Resilience service enables customers to make their data infrastructure central to their security strategy. NetApp Ransomware Resilience enables customers to drive a comprehensive ransomware defense for their ONTAP workloads - from proactive protection, through AI-driven detection, real-time response and clean, fast recovery of mission-critical data.  

“As we look to expand our AI capabilities across borders, complying with local data sovereignty laws while maintaining high performance has been our biggest hurdle,” said Louis Xu, Head of Bitdeer AI Cloud. Bitdeer has Asian offices in Singapore and Bhutan.

“We need infrastructure that does not just store data but intelligently manages it across our hybrid environment. NetApp’s approach gives us the confidence to deploy sovereign AI at scale, with the unified control required to meet compliance standards and support real-time analytics and inference.”