NetApp, the Intelligent Data Infrastructure company, today 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.
Organizations 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 optimized 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 organizations 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 organizations 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.”