NetApp and Oracle to bring ONTAP storage natively to OCI

NetApp and Oracle have announced a fully managed, OCI-native storage service based on ONTAP, targeting AI and regulated enterprise workloads, due within 12 months.

By The Datatech Times Editorial Team AI level 2 of 5
AI level 2 of 5: drafted by our AI editorial assistant from the company's announcement; fact-checked, edited and signed off by Mark Walker, Editorial Director. What the levels mean
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NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) and Oracle (NYSE: ORCL) have jointly announced a new fully managed storage service that will deliver NetApp's ONTAP data management capabilities natively inside Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. The service, named OCI NetApp Storage Service, is targeted at enterprises running AI data pipelines, databases, virtualised environments, high-performance computing and regulated workloads. General availability is planned within the next 12 months, though neither company has disclosed pricing or specific regional availability at launch.

The arrangement is designed to let organisations lift existing ONTAP-based storage estates into OCI without redesigning applications or retraining operations teams. Customers will be able to manage the service through the OCI Console, OCI SDKs and native ONTAP APIs, preserving the multiprotocol access, data-protection policies and governance workflows they already operate on-premises.

What the partnership delivers

Pravjit Tiwana, Senior Vice President and General Manager for Cloud Storage and Services at NetApp, said the service addresses a persistent tension in enterprise cloud migrations. "Customers want the flexibility to move AI and enterprise workloads to the cloud without giving up operational simplicity, data management, and reliability," he said. "OCI NetApp Storage Service gives customers a native OCI experience while allowing them to use the ONTAP familiar capabilities for data protection, migration, governance, and multiprotocol access."

The announcement positions OCI as an alternative to AWS and Azure for enterprises that have standardised on ONTAP on-premises and want to extend, rather than replace, those investments. NetApp already has similar native-service arrangements with AWS (Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP), Azure (Azure NetApp Files) and Google Cloud, making OCI the latest hyperscaler to join that model. The company has consistently argued that this multi-cloud native approach reduces migration risk and shortens time-to-value compared with re-platforming onto proprietary cloud storage.

Market context and competitive landscape

The managed enterprise storage market on public clouds has consolidated around a small number of vendors with proven data-management software stacks. IBM and Pure Storage have pursued their own cloud partnerships, but NetApp's ONTAP retains a particularly large installed base in regulated sectors including financial services, healthcare and government, where data-residency, audit trails and consistent recovery-point objectives are non-negotiable.

OCI has been gaining traction as a lower-cost alternative to the three largest hyperscalers, particularly for Oracle Database workloads, and the partnership gives it a credible enterprise storage narrative beyond Oracle's own block and object services. AI workloads are an increasingly important driver here: training and inference pipelines demand high-throughput, low-latency shared storage with strong data-governance controls, an area where ONTAP's NFS and S3 compatibility is well established.

From a regulatory standpoint, enterprises in the EU running workloads on OCI will need to satisfy GDPR data-residency obligations, and those in financial services must also satisfy DORA operational-resilience requirements, which include specific rules on third-party cloud dependencies and data recoverability. The native integration model, where storage is managed through the same control plane as the rest of the OCI environment, may simplify audit evidence collection compared with third-party overlay solutions.

NetApp and Oracle have not named any design-partner customers or disclosed committed contract values. Buyers in regulated industries will be watching for SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certification confirmations for the new service, along with clarity on which OCI regions will support it at general availability.

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