NetApp plans to acquire PEAK:AIO to expand AI infrastructure capabilities

NetApp Inc (NASDAQ:NTAP), the data infrastructure company, said Friday it plans to acquire PEAK:AIO, a UK-based software company focused on high-performance storage and metadata architecture for artificial intelligence (AI) workloads.

The planned acquisition is intended to strengthen NetApp’s AI infrastructure offering by adding PEAK:AIO’s metadata technology and parallel file architecture, which are designed to support large-scale AI systems.

The companies are targeting infrastructure that can support trillions of files, multi-exabyte deployments and highly parallel workloads as AI systems require greater storage capacity and faster access to data.

PEAK:AIO’s technology is designed to separate metadata, information that describes and organizes stored data, from the data itself, allowing metadata services to scale independently.

The planned combination would integrate PEAK:AIO’s technology with NetApp’s ONTAP software, which provides data management, security and resilience across enterprise storage environments.

NetApp said the architecture is designed to reduce data-related delays that can leave graphics processing units (GPUs), the chips widely used to train and run AI models, waiting for information.

PEAK:AIO’s platform supports parallel Network File System (NFS) access, allowing multiple computing processes to access shared data simultaneously for large-scale workloads.

The Manchester-based company developed its technology through collaborations with research institutions including Los Alamos National Laboratory and Carnegie Mellon University.

PEAK:AIO’s platform is deployed at institutions including Los Alamos National Laboratory, Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Liverpoo...