Domino and NetApp unite enterprise data and AI

Domino Data Lab and NetApp have formed a strategic collaboration to help enterprises unlock AI’s full transformative power using NetApp’s advanced hybrid file storage technology in Domino. For the first time, companies can use one platform to manage both workloads and data movement in the hybrid cloud as well as across environments — making data AI-ready anytime, anywhere and simultaneously scaling data and AI, all with the efficiency, portability, and auditability required by enterprises.

AI’s transformational power remains elusive because enterprises compromise their AI initiatives. Data scientists and IT operate in silos where valuable resources, effort and time are spent trying to scale AI. These initiatives lack the security and efficiency to innovate at the pace business leaders expect, and fall short of governance to comply with policies and regulations. The result is increased risk, excessive costs and lost revenue opportunities. By combining enterprise data and AI management across the AI lifecycle, Domino and NetApp are opening the path for new strategies devoid of such compromises.

“Enterprises cannot capture AI’s opportunity without a unified approach to data and models,” said Jonsi Stefansson, SVP and CTO, Cloud Operations at NetApp. “Intelligent data infrastructure from NetApp helps customers more easily manage their data across a hybrid cloud estate for AI training and inferencing. Our collaboration with Domino allows organisations with a single advanced, unified AI and data stack to scale AI innovation easily, quickly, safely and responsibly across the world’s largest clouds.”

The two companies will co-develop a joint capability streamlining hybrid data and AI operations – allowing data scientists using Domino to provision and share high-performance storage volumes across cloud and on-premises environments with a single click. Powered by NetApp ONTAP and BlueXP™, the integration will offer industry-leading snapshotting, caching, and synchronisation features, ensuring full data traceability and model reproducibility—a critical requirement for preserving audit trails and meeting regulatory compliance. With seamless access to data, AI developers can innovate on models faster while simultaneously satisfying IT needs for secure data management.

“AI innovation stalls when teams must balance it with technical complexity and governance," said Nick Elprin, co-founder and CEO of Domino. “Together with NetApp, we're smashing these barriers, helping our customers unleash AI's full potential immediately.”

"Enterprises have invested heavily in big data, analytics, and cloud-based initiatives over the past decade, yet many still struggle to unlock the full potential of AI,” said Howard Dresner, founder and chief research officer at Dresner Advisory. “Cohesive methods for orchestrating models across any infrastructure and governing data precisely is key for responsible and efficient AI deployment.”

The joint Domino and NetApp solution also eliminates the need to choose between velocity and enterprise readiness, innovation and risk management, or value and return on investment (ROI) of AI initiatives. It does this by creating a common operating environment across all data and models, integration with the world’s largest clouds, and a common control plane – coupled tightly with the AI model development lifecycle to streamline the AI and data lifecycle. This allows enterprises to:

Scale AI and data simultaneously across any infrastructure. Costly data movements or delays impede data, infrastructure, and tool orchestration. Efficient data movement and replication, powered by NetApp ONTAP, makes that data instantly and securely available at scale on the infrastructure where it’s needed for training and inferencing of models, with full resilience and security. Teams can co-locate data, infrastructure, and AI tooling with seamless cloud bursting to accelerate AI projects, ensure compliance with data sovereignty regulations, and drive cost-efficient cloud or repatriation strategies.

End-to-end AI and data governance to trust AI at enterprise scale. Joint governance capabilities enable full traceability, reproducibility, and auditability of all data, including metadata and artefacts. Domino captures this data from users and systems, while NetApp ONTAP’s efficient snapshotting capabilities ensure full data provenance via immutable dataset copies, visibility on policy compliance, and enable audits without disrupting the AI lifecycle. This unprecedented governance scope spanning AI and data saves time lost to forensics, compliance assessments, and risk mitigation.

Put enterprise data at the fingertips of data scientists and AI builders. NetApp’s innovative Data Explorer will power an unprecedented abstraction of underlying infrastructure allowing data scientists to directly search and access available enterprise data anytime, anywhere without delay as they build models and processes. This shrinks AI project timelines and prevents the need for data engineering.

The collaboration’s foundational capability, Domino Cloud running on Amazon FSx for NetApp’s ONTAP, is available today, offering customers:

Curation and sharing of robust, versioned data resources allowing data scientists to collaboratively iterate on model development faster, with write speeds improved by 417% and read speeds by 94% – reducing data loading times, training delays, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) inefficiencies—maximising the return on AI projects and infrastructure investments.

Efficient migration of data between on-premises and cloud environments with NetApp FlexCache® technology, ensuring just-in-time availability, optimised performance, and consistent model governance across environments with Domino.

Storage that grows and shrinks automatically based on needs, with integrated enterprise-grade security and no manual setup or maintenance.