Hitachi Vantara, the data storage, infrastructure, and hybrid cloud management subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. (TSE: 6501), today announced a new solution that combines Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization with Hitachi Vantara Virtual Storage Platform One (VSP One). The new offering enables organizations to reduce reliance on costly, proprietary hypervisors and adopt a unified, hybrid cloud platform to help modernize aging virtualization environments while delivering enterprise resilience and performance.
The new offering comes as enterprises face rising virtualization licensing costs, limited flexibility, and increasing pressure to modernize. According to a recent survey, the increasing complexity of vendor licensing and rising prices has turned routine upkeep into a costly exercise, with nearly three-quarters (73%) of enterprises having been audited, and more than a third acknowledging that compliance, including managing excessive licensing, was the top issue facing their organization.
To address these challenges, the newHitachi Vantara solution integrates Red Hat OpenShift, which includes the Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization feature, and includes pre-validated reference architecture and a powerful VM migration tool that simplifies and accelerates the transition from legacy platforms. VSP One delivers multi-site resilience and seamless failover features that can support continuous operations during outages. The solution allows organizations to run virtual machines (VMs) and containers side by side on the same platform, reducing the need for separate virtualization infrastructure and avoiding duplicate environments, which reduces hardware, software licensing, and operational costs. Additionally, VSP One provides a unified data storage platform for block, file and object storage across on-premises systems and the cloud, which improves data visibility and offers a consistent experience wherever data resides.
“Organizations across industries are looking to modernize IT infrastructure while avoiding vendor lock-in and controlling costs,” said Dan McConnell, senior vice president, product management and enterprise infrastructure, Hitachi Vantara. “By combining Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization with Hitachi Vantara’s high-performance VSP One infrastructure, we’re enabling customers to simplify migration, reduce complexity, and accelerate application delivery on a modern hybrid cloud foundation.Customers want choice without complexity or cost or vendor lock-in.”
The solution includes a new jointly developed reference architecture built for high availability on stretched Red Hat OpenShift clusters. Leveraging Hitachi VSP One Block, Global Active Device (GAD) technology, which enables active-active data access across multiple sites, and enhanced CSI drivers, the architecture supports disaster avoidance, continuous operations, and seamless workload mobility across geographically distributed sites. An optional third-site quorum with Red Hat OpenShift master node support in public cloud or isolated sitesenables maximum availability zone resiliency.
Customers like Alior Bank, a leading European financial institution, are already realizing the benefits of the new solution. Faced with rising licensing fees and limited flexibility in its legacy environment, the bank transitioned to Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization on VSP One.
“Our goal was to build a future-ready IT platform that supports growth while ensuring resilience and performance, which was paramount,” said Piotr Krzak, chief technology officer, Alior Bank. “By working closely with Red Hat and Hitachi Vantara, we’ve built a unified and highly-available environment that accelerates innovation, enhances scalability, and allows us to better serve our customers.”
The Hitachi Vantara solution with Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization offers key benefits for organizations to modernize and migrate from traditional virtualization platforms, including:
- Reduced Operational Costs and Vendor Lock-In: By unifying VMs and containers on a single platform, customers may be able to achieve increased operational and cost efficiency. Furthermore, Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization is based on KVM and KubeVirt, offering greater choice and flexibility through opensource innovation.
- Accelerated Application Delivery and Migration: Integrated, pre-validated systems and storage help accelerate deployment of VMs and containers. Hitachi Vantara’s Storage Plug-in for Containers (HSPC) enables dynamic, persistent storage scaling without overprovisioning.
- Enterprise-Grade Resilience: VSP One is designed to support continuous uptime, 100% data availability, and support for mission-critical workloads.
- End-to-End Automation and Visibility: Integrated observability and automation tools of Red Hat OpenShift, combined with Hitachi Vantara’s intelligent infrastructure management, deliver improved policy consistency, proactive issue resolution, and secure operations across hybrid environments.
“As IT leaders reevaluate traditional virtualization platforms, the ability to migrate and modernize without disruption is critical,” said Stefanie Chiras, Ph.D., senior vice president, Partner Ecosystem Success, Red Hat. “Red Hat OpenShift is the industry’s leading hybrid cloud application platform powered by Kubernetes and built on open standards, supporting VM and container portability across on-prem, public cloud, and edge environments. Together with Hitachi Vantara’s powerful infrastructure, we are enabling our customers to reduce costs, consolidate operations, and build more resilient, cloud-native infrastructure that is ready for what’s next.”
This announcement represents the latest development in the Hitachi Vantara and Red Hat relationship. Earlier this year, the companies announced an update to the Red Hat OpenShift migration toolkit for virtualization, which includes a storage offloading feature for cold migrations, powered by VSP One. Allowing storage offloading during a cold migration can significantly accelerate the process by moving the data-copying workload from the server and network to the storage array itself, reducing downtime and maintaining operational continuity. As a primary driver for the development of this feature, Hitachi Vantara is one of the first to have their offload driver reach technology preview.