NetApp wants businesses to ‘bring your own model’ in storage automation push

NetApp has unveiled a raft of updates aimed at driving automated storage management capabilities for customers.

At company's NetApp Insight 2026 conference in Las Vegas, the company announced an expansion to the NetApp Console, a centralized portal for data and storage management.

Headline updates focus on new AI and agentic AI capabilities within the console, including the ability for customers to directly integrate their own large language models (LLMs).

Jeff Baxter, VP of technical marketing at NetApp, said the update comes in direct response to the growing use of AI in data and infrastructure management processes.

“Just about every enterprise we work with has, by this point, established one or more approved LLMs, often specific enterprise instantiations of them that they’ve validated, they’ve set up guardrails, and they’ve set up how they want to leverage that within their enterprise,” he said.

“The NetApp Console is the front door to the NetApp platform,” he said. “It’s the way in which our customers can easily manage their entire data estate within the NetApp Platform.”

NetApp targets autonomous operations

According to NetApp, new AI-powered features will help streamline storage management by providing customers with predictive maintenance insights and automated remediation.

New fleet management capabilities will let them manage their entire hardware estate as a “single entity” while a new natural language chat capability will help replace manual workflows and reduce strain on IT administrators.

“The conversational ChatOps interface in NetApp Console delivers autonomous storage operations, intent-based provisioning, and policy guardrails across ONTAP storage systems,” the company said in a blog post.

Flexibility and choice are a key focus, according to NetApp. The ChatOps feature, for example, operates under a ‘bring your own model’ approach, allowing customers to use their own selected, domain-specific LLMs.

“The world is transforming where an administrator in natural language or using their microphone can actually speak into that,” said Sandeep Singh, SVP and GM for NetApp’s Data Infrastructure Platform division.

“It will then be able to take that and convert that into the backend operations for storage infrastructure.”

Singh said initial testing of the new features has delivered marked benefits for users.

“This is about simplifying. This is about unifying the operating experience for customers across the board, and this is about enabling much more of the AI type experience for customers – and that’s essentially the feedback we’re hearing from them,” he said.

Singh said the company engaged closely with customers as part of an early access preview to test and provide feedback, which played a key role in fine-tuning the service.

“We were able to go and incorporate that feedback as part of making the Console generally available, so the feedback has been great from that perspective,” he told ITPro.

“We're continuing to work very closely with customers as we go through the adoption curve, because it's always typically a journey, and we want to make sure that we're partnering very closely with customers and just continuing to just zero in on their key pain points.”

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