At the 2025 Google Cloud Next event, NetApp and Google Cloud announced a significant expansion of capabilities for Google Cloud NetApp Volumes, their jointly developed fully managed file storage offering.
The updates provide enhance performance, scalability, and integration with AI and compliance frameworks, targeting large-scale enterprise workloads. The expanded feature set aligns with the growing demand for integrated storage solutions that can support high-throughput, low-latency requirements across AI/ML, EDA, and content-intensive applications.
There are four major enhancements to Google Cloud NetApp Volumes, each addressing specific pain points in deploying and scaling high-performance workloads in the cloud.
Vertex AI Integration
Google Cloud NetApp Volumes will support direct integration with the Vertex AI platform. Customers can access datasets stored in NetApp Volumes from within Vertex AI without building custom data movement or pipeline logic.
The integration enables the use of RAG workflows for LLM applications. NetApp ONTAP manages the underlying file system, providing performance and data management features natively accessible by Vertex AI.
Large Capacity Volume Performance Enhancements
Enhancements to NetApp Volumes under the Premium and Extreme tiers increase maximum volume size and throughput:
- Volumes now start at 15 TiB and scale up to 1 PiB.
- Single-volume throughput scales up to 30 GiB/s.
- These changes eliminate the need for sharding large datasets across multiple volumes, supporting high-I/O workloads such as:
- Electronic Design Automation (EDA)
- AI training and inferencing
- Content data repositories and video processing pipelines
- Availability spans all 14 Google Cloud regions where Premium and Extreme tiers are offered.
Independent Scaling with Flex Service Level
The Flex service level now supports preview functionality for independently scaling capacity, throughput, and IOPS:
- Throughput scales up to 5 GiB/s.
- IOPS scale up to 160K.
- Customers can create custom storage pools based on performance needs without overprovisioning storage capacity.
Support for Assured Workloads (Upcoming)
Google Cloud NetApp Volumes will support the Assured Workloads compliance framework. Customers in regulated industries (e.g., government, finance, healthcare) can configure environments that enforce compliance with regional regulatory regimes.
Key capabilities will include:
- Data residency enforcement
- Transparent access control
- Integration with cloud-native key management systems
Analysis
The tight integration with Vertex AI directly addresses a key challenge in generative AI development — the orchestration and performance of large data pipelines for model training and inferencing. The performance enhancements and scalability improvements reduce architectural complexity for enterprises migrating high-throughput applications to the cloud.
Enabling a 1 PiB single volume with up to 30 GiB/s throughput, NetApp opens the door to use cases historically limited to on-premises HPC infrastructure. This includes semiconductor design workflows, AI workloads requiring rapid access to large training sets, and media production pipelines with low-latency requirements.
The Flex service tier enhancements and compliance support expand the addressable market beyond HPC/AI use cases to include cost-sensitive and regulated workloads. This brings NetApp Volumes in closer functional competition with offerings from AWS (Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP, Amazon EFS) and Microsoft Azure (Azure NetApp Files, Azure Files Premium).
NetApp, with its array of cloud-specific ONTAP offerings, is already one of the top enterprise storage offerings across public cloud environments. The company continues its cloud storage leadership with this set of Google-specific updates. This is a strong and compelling set of offerings.
Competitive Outlook & Advice to IT Buyers
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