Infrastructure modernization often stalls at the storage layer, where moving mission-critical applications to the cloud can mean redesigning them from scratch. Now, AI is raising the stakes as enterprises push decades-old data estates into production AI.
NetApp Inc. and Oracle Corp. are tackling that problem with an inbound, fully managed storage service that runs NetApp’s ONTAP data management software natively inside Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. The co-engineered offering is built to behave like any other OCI service rather than a third-party add-on, according to Pravjit Tiwana (pictured, left), senior vice president and general manager of cloud storage and services at NetApp.
“As far as our partnership, this is a co-engineered and co-developed product of ours,” Tiwana said. “It’s not like we have taken it and bolted it in OCI, but both [Oracle] and our organizations have worked very closely to have a deep integration into [the] control plane, data plane, as well as to the OCI’s native billing infrastructure, to provisioning, to console, to API.”
Tiwana and Konstantinos Papamiltiadis (right), senior vice president of partnerships at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, a division of Oracle, spoke with theCUBE’s Rebecca Knight and Christophe Bertrand at NetApp INSIGHT, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed native ONTAP integration in OCI, migration for existing NetApp workloads and plans to bring AI closer to enterprise data. (* Disclosure below.)
Native integration as a path to infrastructure modernization
Oracle has long built its own storage products, but customers wanted a way to bring mission-critical deployments from their data centers into the cloud. Many already run ONTAP on-premises, so matching that experience was a design priority, Papamiltiadis explained.
“When I’m going into the OCI console, I have the option to use the ONTAP as a native service,” Papamiltiadis said. “For me, the most important thing that we managed to build is, from an operational perspective, we bring everything under one single interface that provides simplicity and consistency.”
The native approach also matters for migration, where many cloud projects get bogged down. The two companies plan to co-sell the service, drawing on NetApp’s experience with other hyperscalers, according to Tiwana.
“The one important thing is nobody wants to redo the application redesign and all,” Tiwana said. “If you have applications or systems running on-prem, you bring it to OCI with ONTAP, you don’t have to do anything. It works as seamlessly as it was working on-prem.”
AI adds another layer to infrastructure modernization. NetApp’s decades of work on data protection, compliance and lineage let it prepare enterprise data for agentic workflows and inferencing, not just store it, Tiwana explained.
“Both the companies do plan to work together to bring Oracle’s great AI efforts into our ONTAP so customers don’t have to move data somewhere else,” Tiwana said. “They can run the AI right where the data lives.”
Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of NetApp INSIGHT:
(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the NetApp INSIGHT 2026 event. Neither NetApp, the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)