Hitachi Vantara has announced a new collaboration with Red Hat to help enterprises modernise virtualisation environments and accelerate their move to hybrid cloud infrastructure. The solution combines Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization with Hitachi Vantara’s Virtual Storage Platform One (VSP One), enabling organisations to migrate away from costly proprietary hypervisors and run virtual machines and containers on a unified platform.
The integrated solution is designed to address rising concerns over increasing virtualisation costs, vendor lock-in, and complex licensing. A recent survey revealed that 73% of enterprises have been audited over licensing issues, with more than a third citing compliance and excessive licensing as their biggest challenge. As these pressures grow, businesses are seeking more flexible, cost-effective alternatives to traditional virtualisation environments.
Simplifying migration and reducing costs
The joint solution integrates Red Hat OpenShift, including its virtualisation capabilities, with pre-validated reference architectures and a dedicated VM migration tool. This simplifies and speeds up the transition from legacy systems while reducing reliance on multiple infrastructure platforms. By running virtual machines and containers together on a single system, organisations can avoid duplicate environments and reduce hardware, software, and operational costs.
VSP One also serves as a unified data storage platform for block, file, and object storage across on-premises and cloud environments. This enhances data visibility and provides a consistent user experience regardless of where data is stored. It also offers multi-site resilience and seamless failover to ensure continuous operations during outages.
“Organisations across industries are looking to modernise IT infrastructure while avoiding vendor lock-in and controlling costs,” said Dan McConnell, senior vice president of product management and enterprise infrastructure at 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.”
Built for high availability and resilience
The collaboration introduces a jointly developed reference architecture designed for high availability on stretched Red Hat OpenShift clusters. It leverages Hitachi VSP One Block, Global Active Device (GAD) technology, and enhanced CSI drivers to enable active-active data access across multiple sites. This ensures disaster avoidance, continuous operations, and seamless workload mobility across geographically distributed environments. An optional third-site quorum, supported by Red Hat OpenShift master nodes in public cloud or isolated sites, provides maximum availability zone resiliency.
One of the early adopters of the solution, Alior Bank, a leading European financial institution, implemented Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization on VSP One to address escalating licensing costs and limited flexibility in its previous virtualisation environment.
“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 at 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.”
Enabling modern hybrid cloud infrastructure
The combined solution offers several key advantages for enterprises transitioning from traditional virtualisation platforms. By consolidating virtual machines and containers on a single open source-based platform built on KVM and KubeVirt, organisations can reduce operational costs and minimise dependency on proprietary vendors. Integrated systems and storage accelerate deployment and support dynamic scaling without overprovisioning, while enterprise-grade resilience ensures continuous uptime and 100% data availability for mission-critical workloads.
End-to-end automation and observability features, powered by Red Hat OpenShift and Hitachi Vantara’s intelligent infrastructure management, improve policy consistency, enable proactive issue resolution, and ensure secure operations across hybrid environments.
“As IT leaders reevaluate traditional virtualisation platforms, the ability to migrate and modernise without disruption is critical,” said Stefanie Chiras, senior vice president of Partner Ecosystem Success at 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.”
With this collaboration, Hitachi Vantara and Red Hat aim to offer organisations a flexible, future-ready platform to modernise their IT environments and accelerate digital transformation while reducing costs and dependency on proprietary technologies.
