Hitachi Vantara, the data storage, infrastructure, and hybrid cloud management subsidiary of Hitachi, has announced a new solution that combines Hitachi Vantara’s Virtual Storage Platform One (VSP One) with Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization. The collaborative offering lets organizations reduce their reliance on costly, proprietary hypervisors and adopt a unified, hybrid cloud platform to help modernize aging virtualization environments, while delivering enterprise resilience and performance.
The context here comes from enterprises facing rising virtualization licensing costs, limited flexibility and increasing pressure to modernize. According to a recent survey, the increasing complexity of vendor licensing and rising prices have turned routine upkeep into a costly exercise, with nearly three-quarters (73%) of enterprises having been audited and more than a third acknowledging that compliance, including managing excessive licensing, is the top issue facing their organization.
To address these challenges, the new Hitachi Vantara solution integrates Red Hat OpenShift, which includes the Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization feature, a pre-validated reference architecture and a powerful VM migration tool that simplifies and accelerates the transition from legacy platforms. This complements VSP One’s multi-site resilience and seamless failover features that can support continuous operations during outages.
“With this release, we’ve brought together VSP One’s enterprise performance, scalability, and availability with Red Hat virtualization to modernize the virtualization platform,” said Marcel Escorcio, Vice President & General Manager, Canada at Hitachi Vantara. For the first time, we’ve jointly enabled rapid VM migration from legacy virtualization to Red Hat OpenShift, up to nine times faster, leveraging the storage offloading power of VSP One arrays. This marks a deeper, more strategic collaboration focused on hybrid cloud modernization.” This means that organizations can run virtual machines (VMs) and containers side by side on the same platform, reducing the need for separate virtualization infrastructure and avoiding duplicate environments, which lowers hardware, software licensing, and operational costs. In addition, VSP One provides a unified data storage platform for block, file and object storage across on-premises systems and the cloud, improving data visibility and providing a consistent experience wherever data resides.
“Red Hat is a key strategic partner,” Escorcio emphasized. “Their leadership in hybrid cloud technologies and automation complements our strengths in enterprise infrastructure and data resilience. Together, we’re helping customers modernize cloud infrastructure without vendor lock-in.”
The two companies have collaborated previously.
“Previous partnerships centered around containerization and Kubernetes-based platforms,” Escorcio indicated. “Those efforts laid the foundation for this new solution, which unifies virtualization, containers, and storage migration. The new capabilities help customers accelerate migration to Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization while reducing downtime. Storage offload with VSP One eliminates network congestion and preserves compute resources, ensuring business services remain available. A notable success story is Alior Bank, a large European financial institution that built a future-ready IT platform supporting growth, resilience, and performance through a unified, highly available environment that accelerates innovation and scalability.”
Escorcio explained how this latest alliance with Red Hat came about.
“The collaboration was driven by customer demand for open, cost-effective alternatives to proprietary hypervisors, without compromising performance, scale, and availability,” he said. “Enterprises are facing rising licensing costs and limited flexibility with legacy platforms. This solution addresses those challenges with a unified hybrid cloud foundation offering enterprise-grade scale and resilience.”
Combining Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization with Hitachi Vantara’s VSP One infrastructure lets customers simplify migration, reduce complexity and accelerate application delivery on a modern hybrid cloud foundation.
“Many partnerships aim to support hybrid cloud, but this one stands out for its depth of integration, seamless workload mobility, and enterprise capabilities,” Escorcio said. “It enables VMs and containers to run side by side on a single platform and includes a pre-validated reference architecture, automated migration tools, and enterprise-grade resilience.”
The solution employs a new jointly developed reference architecture built for high availability on stretched Red Hat OpenShift clusters. Leveraging Hitachi VSP One Block, Global Active Device (GAD) technology, which enables active-active data access across multiple sites and enhanced CSI drivers, the architecture supports disaster avoidance, continuous operations and seamless workload mobility across geographically distributed sites. An optional third-site quorum with Red Hat OpenShift master node support in public cloud or isolated sites enables maximum availability zone resiliency.
“The VM migration toolkit is a key differentiator in this,” Escorcio indicated. “It simplifies and accelerates transitions from legacy platforms, up to nine times faster, while reducing the risk of data loss. The storage offloading feature, powered by VSP One, reduces server load and speeds up cold migrations. The reference architecture ensures high availability and consistent performance.
“This is the first time we’ve combined these technologies in such a comprehensive way,” he stressed. “It enables unified operations with support for stretched clusters and active-active failover, ensuring maximum resilience.”
The new reference architecture built for high availability on stretched Red Hat OpenShift clusters is also a plus, Escorcio said
“This architecture was co-developed by Hitachi Vantara and Red Hat for environments with minimal tolerance for downtime. It supports active-active site configurations using Global Active Device (GAD) technology, ensuring zero RPO failover and continuous operations during outages or maintenance.”
Key benefits for organizations modernizing with Red Hat, especially using Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization include reduced Costs and vendor lock-in, because open source virtualization lowers hypervisor costs. Pre-validated design and automated provisioning accelerate application delivery. Enterprise-grade resilience comes from 100% data availability and GAD for multi-site failover. Increased automation and observability come from Integrated tools for consistent policies and secure hybrid operations. Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization also enables VMs and containers to coexist, simplifying modernization.
This announcement represents the latest development in the Hitachi Vantara and Red Hat relationship. Earlier this year, the companies announced an update to the Red Hat OpenShift migration toolkit for virtualization.
“The update introduced storage offloading for cold migrations, powered by VSP One,” Escorcio stated. “It moves the data copy process from servers to the storage layer, reducing migration time and freeing server resources for other workloads.” As a primary driver for the development of this feature, Hitachi Vantara is one of the first to have its offload driver reach technology preview.
Escorcio thinks this relationship will be a good one for channel partners.
“This is a strong channel play for customers who want on-premises control with cloud-like agility,” he said. “It delivers guaranteed data availability, open-source flexibility, and enterprise-grade infrastructure – providing a compelling alternative to hyperscaler lock-in. Many of our partners also sell Red Hat solutions. This alignment strengthens our ecosystem and simplifies adoption for customers, making it easier to deploy and manage hybrid cloud solutions.”