Hitachi Vantara, a subsidiary of Hitachi Ltd. specialising in data storage and hybrid cloud management, has teamed up with Cisco to launch a new co-engineered solution designed for Red Hat OpenShift. This solution, known as Cisco and Hitachi Adaptive Solutions for Converged Infrastructure, integrates Cisco’s compute and networking systems with Hitachi Vantara’s Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) arrays, powered by Red Hat OpenShift’s Kubernetes-based container management tools.
The new offering aims to help enterprises accelerate private and hybrid cloud adoption, enhance operational consistency, and lower energy consumption through AI-driven data orchestration. As businesses increasingly turn to AI-driven digital transformation, the demand for application container technology is growing. However, security concerns remain a significant hurdle, with a recent Red Hat report revealing that 67% of organisations have delayed or slowed container-based application deployments due to security risks.
Simplifying container adoption and improving efficiency
The joint solution addresses these challenges by offering a pre-validated infrastructure that simplifies container adoption. It enhances application development speed, ensures operational consistency, and strengthens resilience for workloads requiring low latency. With AI-powered data management and a trusted storage platform, businesses can improve efficiency, reduce risks, and minimise their environmental impact.
“Organisations today are under immense pressure to modernise their IT infrastructure while meeting sustainability goals. Our collaboration with Cisco and Red Hat reflects our commitment to delivering solutions that support both business innovation and environmental responsibility,” said Dan McConnell, Senior Vice President, Product Management and Enterprise Infrastructure at Hitachi Vantara. “This converged solution can empower businesses to build and scale containerised applications more seamlessly, delivering high performance and greater operational consistency.”
Jeremy Foster, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Cisco Compute, echoed this sentiment: “Cisco’s collaboration with Hitachi Vantara and Red Hat marks a significant milestone for customers looking to modernise their data centres for a new era of agility, efficiency, and resilience. Together, we have created a powerful and scalable solution that streamlines modern application development through the seamless deployment of container technology on the Cisco and Hitachi Adaptive Solutions for Converged Infrastructure.”
Key benefits of the converged solution
The new infrastructure solution provides enterprises with a range of advantages:
- Accelerated application deployment – Pre-validated and certified infrastructure enables businesses to deploy applications faster and more efficiently.
- Operational consistency – A unified platform ensures seamless cloud operations across on-premises and hybrid environments, reducing risks and allowing smoother workload mobility.
- Enhanced data resilience – Hitachi Vantara’s VSP arrays offer continuous uptime, real-time monitoring, and geo-redundancy to protect critical data and maintain accessibility.
- Improved sustainability – VSP arrays, recognised as a top energy-efficient storage solution, optimise power usage, helping organisations meet their sustainability objectives.
By providing a unified platform for deploying and managing containerised and virtualised applications across different environments, this solution enables organisations to consolidate workloads on fewer systems, improving efficiency and reducing energy consumption. Hitachi storage has also recently earned ENERGY STAR certification and has been recognised as a leading storage solution for performance and energy efficiency.
“In today’s fast-evolving IT landscape, businesses are under increasing pressure to modernise their infrastructure while managing complexity and risk,” said Ryan King, Senior Director, Hardware Partners at Red Hat. “Red Hat OpenShift offers a trusted, comprehensive application platform that empowers organisations to achieve cloud-native modernisation in alignment with their business goals. By enabling Hitachi Vantara and Cisco infrastructure on Red Hat OpenShift, we can provide an enterprise-ready solution to help streamline container adoption and support more scalable operations.”
The solution is available through Hitachi EverFlex, offering hybrid cloud solutions as a service on a consumption-based model. This flexible and scalable approach allows enterprises to manage their resources with minimal upfront investment, helping them modernise their IT infrastructure while staying cost-efficient and environmentally responsible.
