How is FlexPod Advancing AI Solutions?

NetApp, the California-based data infrastructure and cloud services company, collaborated with Cisco, the American multinational technology corporation giant, on June 3, 2026, to offer new validated solutions for secure, scalable, and simplified AI.

The collaboration is aimed at expanding FlexPod, a data center platform developed through a long-standing partnership between Cisco and NetApp originally launched in 2010, to support AI adoption for businesses of all sizes and maturity levels, using pre-tested, validated architectures and enterprise data management as a consistent foundation, the companies said.

"NetApp and Cisco's longstanding partnership on FlexPod has already proven effective, saving customers up to 20 percent of their time in infrastructure management and maintenance. Now, we are applying our combined expertise to modern challenges to accelerate AI adoption while reducing risk with built-in security," said Dallas Olson, Chief Commercial Officer at NetApp.

The new solutions include Enterprise AI Deployments, AI Inferencing and RAG Workflows, and Edge Computing, focused on delivering proven performance, security, and unified management for AI.

For enterprises, FlexPod simplifies enterprise AI, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and inferencing deployments using pre-tested NVIDIA architectures. It reduces complexity, secures data pipelines, and uses high-performance Cisco networking to deliver scalable, cost-effective AI outcomes, the companies said.

The product also extends to the edge, running AI inferencing, virtualized, and containerized workloads with low latency. Combining Cisco Unified Edge and NetApp storage, it simplifies distributed operations through automated, centralized management.

Jeremy Foster, GM and SVP at Cisco.

"By collaborating with NetApp to extend Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA to our validated FlexPod solution, we're helping customers address AI-specific risks such as data exposure, governance gaps, and compliance challenges while simplifying how AI infrastructure is deployed and operated," said Jeremy Foster, GM and SVP at Cisco.

Jason Hardy, vice president of Storage Technologies at NVIDIA, said, "NetApp AI Data Engine, co-engineered on the NVIDIA AI Data Platform and validated with the Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA, gives organizations the secure, AI-ready data foundation to deploy AI factories on FlexPod infrastructure at scale."