Home Enterprise NetApp Aims To Unleash The Full Potential Of Data Fabric

NetApp Aims To Unleash The Full Potential Of Data Fabric

by Adam Armstrong

Today NetApp announced its new AI-enabled virtual support assistant, Elio, and its new Active IQ cloud-based analytics. These new features are designed to deliver an insight-driven digital customer experience informed by its deep knowledge base, predictive analytics, proactive support, and cognitive computing. NetApp goes on to claim that these new solutions enable customers to gain the full potential of data fabric, both on premises and in the cloud, while being able to focus more or their core business and worry less about infrastructure.


Today NetApp announced its new AI-enabled virtual support assistant, Elio, and its new Active IQ cloud-based analytics. These new features are designed to deliver an insight-driven digital customer experience informed by its deep knowledge base, predictive analytics, proactive support, and cognitive computing. NetApp goes on to claim that these new solutions enable customers to gain the full potential of data fabric, both on premises and in the cloud, while being able to focus more or their core business and worry less about infrastructure.

Over the last few years many organizations have realized that data, and the insights that can be gained from it, is one of the most valuable assets they have. However, data is being generated at such a massive scale that most organizations are unable to extract value fast enough to make a difference in time. Methods are being realized on how to maximally extract data; these include predictive analytics, cognitive computing, and proactive care. NetApp this taking these methods and combining them with its massive user base in order to address the above issues.

NetApp’s community user base consists of billions of data points gathered daily from over 300,000 Data Fabric solutions. Extracting insights from the community has led the company to come up with both Elio’s cognitive computing and Active IQ’s machine learning. These new solutions will be included on all NetApp systems. NetApp states that Elio and Active IQ will accelerate access to these collective insights to save time through a transformed customer experience.

New services, solutions, and software include:

  • Digital Support featuring Elio, built with IBM Watson services — With cognitive computing, virtual support assistant Elio presents the best answers up to four times faster than traditional methods by continuously learning from the community wisdom in NetApp support case histories.
    • 24/7 access to Elio chat on-line, on mobile, or within products
    • Search-engine access to NetApp’s technical resources, find information without logging in to the support site or opening a case
  • NetApp Active IQ – Take action using intelligent insight from cloud-based analytics that combine predictive analytics and proactive support to increase storage efficiency and configuration compliance, and reduce risk with recommended upgrades.
    • New features include Risk Advisor, Storage Efficiency Advisor and Interoperability Advisor
    • Leveraging community wisdom, Active IQ provides access to rich insights and predictive analytics for all NetApp products
    • In a single view, gain simple and secure visibility into the health of your entire Data Fabric, both on-premises and in the cloud.

Elio is all about transforming customer experience. Using Watson technology to interact with users in natural language and respond to questions, Elio will provide 24/7 customer service that is easy to access anywhere. Elio trains with existing staff to gain the most information and give the best possible service to customers as well as learning from existing NetApp data.

NetApp claims that, by using NetApp analytics, their customers have been able to save quite a bit on costs, collectively to the tune of $600 million. Adding Active IQ with its predictive analytics can save even more by finding performance issues or making configuration recommendations to help optimize a company’s data infrastructure across their hybrid cloud, including Amazon and Azure. The predictive nature of Active IQ’s abilities mean the several problems can be avoiding entirely resulting in higher availability and no time lost.

Availability and Pricing

Elio and Active IQ are available now with a NetApp support contract.

NetApp main site

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