Hitachi & Red Hat Partner to Modernize Hybrid Cloud
▼ Summary
– Hitachi Vantara and Red Hat have integrated OpenShift Virtualisation with VSP One to simplify VM migration and reduce vendor lock-in.
– The solution addresses rising virtualisation costs and licensing complexity by unifying VMs and containers on a single platform.
– It provides enterprise-grade resilience with multi-site failover and continuous operations during outages.
– Customers can accelerate application delivery and reduce costs through pre-validated architecture and dynamic storage scaling.
– The partnership includes a jointly developed reference architecture supporting disaster avoidance and workload mobility across sites.
A new strategic partnership between Hitachi Vantara and Red Hat delivers a powerful hybrid cloud solution designed to help enterprises modernize aging virtual infrastructure. This integrated offering combines Red Hat OpenShift Virtualisation with Hitachi Vantara’s Virtual Storage Platform One (VSP One), creating a unified platform that simplifies virtual machine migration, reduces operational costs, and minimizes vendor lock-in. Businesses grappling with escalating virtualization licensing fees and infrastructure complexity now have a validated path toward a more flexible, resilient hybrid cloud environment.
Many organizations currently face significant challenges with proprietary virtualization systems, including restrictive licensing terms and limited flexibility. Recent industry surveys indicate that nearly three-quarters of enterprises have undergone software audits, with over a third identifying license compliance and management as their primary operational headache. The Hitachi-Red Hat collaboration directly addresses these pain points through a pre-validated reference architecture and specialized migration tools that streamline the transition from legacy platforms.
The solution enables companies to run both virtual machines and containers simultaneously on the same platform, eliminating the need for separate virtualization infrastructure and duplicate environments. This consolidation significantly reduces hardware requirements, software licensing expenses, and ongoing operational overhead. VSP One delivers multi-site resilience with seamless failover capabilities, ensuring continuous operations even during unexpected outages. The platform also provides unified data storage for block, file, and object storage across on-premises systems and cloud environments, improving data visibility and delivering a consistent experience regardless of where data resides.
Dan McConnell, Senior Vice President of Product Management and Enterprise Infrastructure at Hitachi Vantara, emphasized that “organizations across industries are looking to modernize IT infrastructure while avoiding vendor lock-in and controlling costs. By combining Red Hat OpenShift Virtualisation 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.”
The jointly developed reference architecture supports high availability through stretched Red Hat OpenShift clusters. Leveraging Hitachi VSP One Block with Global Active Device technology, the solution enables active-active data access across multiple sites. Enhanced CSI drivers support disaster avoidance, continuous operations, and seamless workload mobility across geographically distributed locations. An optional third-site quorum with Red Hat OpenShift master node support in public cloud or isolated sites provides maximum availability zone resiliency.
European financial institution Alior Bank has already implemented the solution to address rising licensing fees and flexibility limitations in their legacy environment. Piotr Krzak, Chief Technology Officer at Alior Bank, noted that “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.”
Key advantages of the Hitachi Vantara solution with Red Hat OpenShift Virtualisation include:
Reduced operational costs and vendor dependency through unified VM and container management on a single platform. Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, built on KVM and KubeVirt technologies, provides greater choice and flexibility through open source innovation.
Faster application deployment and migration via integrated, pre-validated systems and storage components. Hitachi Vantara’s Storage Plug-in for Containers enables dynamic, persistent storage scaling without overprovisioning resources.
Enterprise-class reliability with VSP One engineered to support continuous uptime, 100% data availability, and mission-critical workload requirements.
Comprehensive automation and visibility through Red Hat OpenShift’s integrated observability tools combined with Hitachi Vantara’s intelligent infrastructure management, delivering consistent policy enforcement, proactive issue resolution, and secure operations across hybrid environments.
Stefanie Chiras, Ph.D., Senior Vice President of Partner Ecosystem Success at Red Hat, commented that “as IT leaders reevaluate traditional virtualization platforms, the ability to migrate and modernize without disruption is critical. 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.”
This announcement builds upon the existing relationship between Hitachi Vantara and Red Hat. Earlier this year, the companies enhanced the Red Hat OpenShift migration toolkit for virtualization with a storage offloading feature for cold migrations powered by VSP One. This innovation significantly accelerates migration processes by transferring data-copying workloads from servers and networks to the storage array itself, reducing downtime and maintaining operational continuity. Hitachi Vantara emerged as a primary driver for this feature’s development and was among the first to have their offload driver reach technology preview status.
(Source: ITWire Australia)