NetApp has completed its acquisition of PEAK:AIO, the Manchester-based software-defined AI storage company, adding metadata services and parallel file system technology aimed at AI clouds and GPU-as-a-service providers. The company announced the completion on 2 November 2026.
The technology is meant to support NetApp Novus, which NetApp describes as its fastest storage, and to scale to zettabyte-scale file systems. It will be brought into NetApp's ONTAP-based data architecture, giving existing ONTAP customers a path to the new capabilities. PEAK:AIO separates metadata from data, so performance can scale with concurrency and very large namespaces.
"AI infrastructure is reaching unprecedented scale, demanding a new approach to storage built from the ground up," said George Kurian, NetApp's chief executive. He added that combining PEAK:AIO's metadata and parallel namespace expertise with NetApp's platform would deliver a "next-generation, zettabyte-scale architecture" for those providers.
Syam Nair, NetApp's chief product officer, framed it around GPU utilisation. "The AI factory is only as productive as its data pipeline," he said, adding that separating metadata from data lets customers run more AI workloads on existing infrastructure, using open standards rather than proprietary clients.
Mark Klarzynski, founder and chief technology officer of PEAK:AIO, said: "NetApp and PEAK:AIO were built around the shared conviction that the AI era needs data infrastructure designed to scale to extraordinary levels." PEAK:AIO is deployed at Los Alamos National Laboratory, NHS AIDE, Oxford Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Liverpool, the University of Strathclyde MediForge Hub and the Zoological Society of London.
NetApp attached its usual forward-looking caveats: statements about unreleased offerings are for information only and may change, and the company has made no commitment on timing for products using PEAK:AIO's technology.
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