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. This release addresses the rapid growth in unstructured data required for AI workloads while managing that data across increasingly distributed hybrid environments.

In its Object Storage Solutions Landscape, Q1 2026 report, Forrester noted that the rise of generative AI has pushed object storage further into an AI-optimized data platform. 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.

"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," said Sandeep Singh, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Platform at NetApp.

Key Features and Capabilities

StorageGRID 12.1 introduces several enhancements aimed at large-scale AI operations:

• Global Federated Namespace: Customers can operate at massive scale without rearchitecting applications or workflows. Federated namespaces enable management of multiple globally-distributed StorageGRID systems scaling up to 10 Exabytes in a single namespace.
• Performance and Efficiency: StorageGRID 12.1 delivers up to 400 percent higher throughput compared to version 12.0, depending on workload and object size. The system can now deliver up to 12 TB/s of throughput to AI Factories. Batch operations allow customers to execute operations on billions of objects, and new capabilities enable AI agents to track changes to object storage buckets since the last scan.
• Security and Governance: Expanded controls for regulated environments include multi-admin verification to help accelerate innovation while protecting data.

Industry Recognition

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 optimized for hybrid, multicloud, and sovereign use cases. The firm identified NetApp as 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.