NetApp announced the release of StorageGRID 12.1, designed to help customers scale AI and other modern workloads with a federated global namespace. The new capabilities improve how data is accessed, processed, and managed across distributed environments to support AI data pipelines, data lakes, and modern object-based applications.
Organisations are contending with rapid growth in unstructured data to serve AI workloads while also managing that data across increasingly distributed hybrid environments. In its Object Storage Solutions Landscape, Q1 2026 report, Forrester notes that the rise of generative AI has pushed object storage further into an AI‑optimised data platform beyond its historical uses supporting enterprise data strategies with scalable, durable storage for unstructured data, media, and backups. The updates to NetApp StorageGRID enable organisations to leverage their object data for these emerging uses with new capabilities that simplify operations, improve performance, and reduce costs for data-intensive workloads such as AI.
“As organisations race to turn rapidly growing and distributed volumes of unstructured data into insight and action, they need infrastructure that makes data intelligent, accessible, and ready for AI,” said Sandeep Singh, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Platform at NetApp. “With StorageGRID 12.1, NetApp is extending the power of our data platform, giving customers a globally unified namespace to manage data at scale, accelerate AI and analytics workloads, and extract more value from their data wherever it lives.”
StorageGRID 12.1 enables organisations to scale AI and modern workloads across globally distributed environments with new capabilities including:
- Global federated namespace: Customers can now operate at massive scale without rearchitecting applications or workflows with the introduction of federated namespaces. Federated namespaces enable management of multiple globally-distributed StorageGRID systems scaling up to 10 Exabytes in a single namespace.
- Large performance, efficiency, and data management improvements: Helping customers reduce compute costs and improve efficiency of modern workloads, StorageGRID 12.1 delivers up to 400 per cent higher throughput compared to 12.0 depending on workload and object size. With the performance enhancements, StorageGRID can now deliver up to 12 TB/s of throughput to AI Factories. Batch operations allow customers to easily execute operations on billions of objects. New capabilities enable AI agents to easily track changes to object storage buckets since the last scan, enhancing the ability to build comprehensive AI data pipelines.
- Expanded security and governance capabilities: Stronger controls for regulated environments help enable customers to accelerate innovation while protecting their data with multi-admin verification.
Recognising NetApp among the top object storage solutions, Forrester named NetApp a Leader in The Forrester Wave: Object Storage Solutions, Q2 2026. According to the report, “NetApp has a compelling vision of enterprise data infrastructure optimised for hybrid, multicloud, and sovereign use cases,” and is “a strong fit for large enterprises managing distributed, regulated object estates that want to balance governance and hybrid consistency against the need for AI-native storage services.” This is Forrester’s inaugural Wave evaluation of the object storage market.
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