Hitachi Vantara & Red Hat unite to simplify VM migration costs
Hitachi Vantara has announced a new collaboration with Red Hat focused on supporting organisations in moving from proprietary hypervisors to a hybrid cloud platform that combines virtual machines and containers.
Solution details
The partnership involves the integration of Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization with Hitachi Vantara's Virtual Storage Platform One (VSP One). This combined platform is designed to simplify virtual machine (VM) migration, enable the concurrent running of VMs and containers, and deliver a unified operational experience along with built-in resilience for enterprise environments.
The integration is being launched at a time when many businesses are experiencing increased costs related to virtualisation licensing and a push to modernise legacy systems. A recent industry survey cited in the announcement found that 73% of enterprises had been audited on licensing during the previous year, while over a third reported compliance and excessive licensing as their primary operational challenge.
Hitachi Vantara stated that the new offering addresses these challenges by providing tools for easier migration away from older platforms and towards a unified infrastructure. The solution includes a pre-validated reference architecture and a new VM migration tool to assist in the transition process. The VSP One platform also supports multi-site resilience, using features such as seamless failover to maintain operations in the event of outages.
Reducing complexity and cost
"Organisations across industries are looking to modernize IT infrastructure while avoiding vendor lock-in and controlling costs. 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, and we're delivering," said Dan McConnell, Senior Vice President, Product Management and Enterprise Infrastructure, Hitachi Vantara.
The new architecture employs Hitachi VSP One Block and Global Active Device (GAD) technology to provide active-active data access across sites, supporting disaster avoidance and continuous operations. Enhanced CSI drivers and an optional third-site quorum further improve availability and resilience, with support for Red Hat OpenShift master nodes in public clouds or isolated sites.
Customer deployment
Alior Bank, which operates in Europe, is among the customers already using the solution. Facing pressures from rising licensing fees and a desire for greater flexibility, the bank moved its operations 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. 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," said Piotr Krzak, Chief Technology Officer, Alior Bank.
Key benefits outlined
The combined platform has been positioned as offering reduced operational costs and vendor lock-in by allowing organisations to unify VM and container environments. As Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization is based on open source technologies such as KVM and KubeVirt, the solution aims to give customers more flexibility compared to proprietary alternatives.
The integrated nature of the offering is designed to enable faster migration and deployment, with Hitachi Vantara's Storage Plug-in for Containers (HSPC) providing dynamic, persistent storage that can be scaled as needed. The VSP One platform has also been designed with continuous uptime and data availability in mind, supporting workloads seen as critical to enterprise operations.
Joint ecosystem approach
"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 that is ready for what's next," said Stefanie Chiras, Ph.D., Senior Vice President, Partner Ecosystem Success, Red Hat.
This announcement follows earlier developments by the two companies, including updates to the Red Hat OpenShift migration toolkit for virtualisation, which now features a storage offloading capability powered by VSP One. According to Hitachi Vantara, offloading the data copying workload from the server and network to the storage array during cold migrations helps reduce downtime and maintains continuity for operations.
