Hitachi Vantara & Red Hat partner to ease hybrid cloud shift

Hitachi Vantara and Red Hat have announced a joint solution aimed at helping enterprises modernise their legacy virtualisation environments and accelerate hybrid cloud adoption while managing costs and reducing dependency on specific vendors.

Virtualisation migration

The new solution integrates Red Hat OpenShift Virtualisation with Hitachi Vantara Virtual Storage Platform One (VSP One), giving customers the capability to run virtual machines (VMs) and containers on a single platform. This aims to help organisations reduce their reliance on proprietary hypervisors, streamline operations, and provide more flexibility in cloud-specific deployments.

The announcement follows mounting pressures on enterprises stemming from the increasing complexity and cost of virtualisation licensing. A recent survey highlighted that 73% of enterprises have undergone licensing audits, with over a third citing compliance and excessive licensing as a top concern for their IT operations.

Cost control and operational efficiency

Key features of the offering include pre-validated reference architecture and a VM migration tool. These elements are designed to ease and accelerate migration from legacy platforms, while VSP One adds multi-site resilience and seamless failover functionalities, supporting continuous operation during potential outages. The integration allows both VMs and containers to be managed within the same infrastructure, which the companies state helps reduce duplicate environments and cuts down hardware and software costs, as well as ongoing operational expenditure.

The unified storage approach with VSP One aims to enhance visibility and consistency for data stored across both on-premises and cloud locations by offering block, file, and object storage within a single platform.

Dan McConnell, Senior Vice President, Product Management & Enterprise Infrastructure, Hitachi Vantara, said:

"Organisations across industries are looking to modernise 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. Customers want choice without complexity or cost or vendor lock-in."

Resilience and availability

The solution incorporates a jointly developed reference architecture focused on high availability, using stretched Red Hat OpenShift clusters. The design leverages Hitachi VSP One Block technology and Global Active Device (GAD), providing active-active data access across multiple locations. Enhanced Container Storage Interface (CSI) drivers also support scenarios such as disaster avoidance, uninterrupted operations, and cross-site workload mobility. An optional third-site quorum setup is available to maximise resilience by supporting Red Hat OpenShift master nodes in either public cloud or isolated sites.

Industry application

Alior Bank, a European financial institution, has implemented the new solution to address growing licensing costs and operational limitations associated with its previous environment.

"Our goal was to build a future-ready IT platform that supports growth while ensuring resilience and performance, which was paramount. 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 offering provides organisations with several core benefits: reduced operational costs by consolidating VMs and containers onto a single platform, potentially improved cost efficiency, and mitigated vendor dependence through the use of open source technologies such as KVM and KubeVirt. It also aims to speed up application deployment and migration by utilising Hitachi Vantara's Storage Plug-in for Containers (HSPC), enabling dynamic and persistent storage scaling while maintaining consistent availability for mission-critical workloads. Integrated tools for automation and visibility are intended to help improve operations management across hybrid environments.

Stefanie Chiras, Ph.D., Senior Vice President, Partner Ecosystem Success, Red Hat, said:

"As IT leaders reevaluate traditional virtualisation platforms, the ability to migrate and modernise 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 that is ready for what's next."

Joint development progress

The announcement forms part of the ongoing partnership between Hitachi Vantara and Red Hat. Earlier in the year, an update was made to the Red Hat OpenShift migration toolkit for virtualisation, which introduced a storage offloading feature for cold migrations. Powered by VSP One, this feature is intended to shift the data-copying workload from servers and networks to the storage array itself, thereby reducing migration times and service interruptions. Hitachi Vantara is among the first to make its offload driver available for technology preview, following customer demand for enhanced migration capabilities.