Hitachi Vantara introduces new hybrid cloud solution with Red Hat OpenShift Virtualisation

Hitachi Vantara, the data storage and hybrid cloud subsidiary of Hitachi, has announced a new enterprise solution integrating Red Hat OpenShift Virtualisation with Hitachi Vantara Virtual Storage Platform One (VSP One).

The solution enables organisations to reduce reliance on proprietary hypervisors, streamline migration from legacy systems, and modernise ageing virtualisation environments, all while ensuring enterprise-grade performance and resilience.

This comes as companies grapple with rising virtualisation licensing costs and increasingly complex vendor audits. According to a recent survey, 73 percent of enterprises have faced software audits, with more than a third citing licensing compliance and cost management as their top challenge.

Simplifying modernisation and reducing vendor lock-in

To address these concerns, Hitachi Vantara’s latest offering integrates Red Hat OpenShift and its Virtualisation feature within a pre-validated reference architecture. The solution includes a powerful VM migration tool, helping organisations shift away from traditional hypervisors more efficiently.

It also enables virtual machines (VMs) and containers to run side by side on the same platform, eliminating the need for separate infrastructures and reducing both software licensing and operational costs.

The VSP One platform supports multi-site resilience, seamless failover, and continuous operations during outages. With unified data management across block, file, and object storage, it delivers consistent performance across on-premises and cloud environments.

Industry leaders weigh in

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.”

He added that customers increasingly demand choice without complexity or cost, and this collaboration provides exactly that.

Stefanie Chiras, PhD, Senior Vice President, Partner Ecosystem Success, Red Hat, noted, “As IT leaders reevaluate traditional virtualisation platforms, the ability to migrate and modernise without disruption is critical. 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.”

Built for high availability and resilience

The jointly developed reference architecture supports stretched Red Hat OpenShift clusters and leverages Hitachi’s Global Active Device (GAD) technology for active-active data access across multiple sites.

An optional third-site quorum adds further redundancy by hosting Red Hat OpenShift master nodes in a public cloud or isolated location. This configuration provides maximum availability zone resiliency, ideal for mission-critical workloads that demand uninterrupted uptime.

Real-world success: Alior Bank’s modification

One of the early adopters, Alior Bank, a European financial institution, has transitioned to Red Hat OpenShift Virtualisation on VSP One.

Piotr Krzak, Chief Technology Officer, Alior Bank, said,
“Our goal was to build a future-ready IT platform that supports growth while ensuring resilience and performance. 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.”

Key benefits of the Hitachi Vantara and Red Hat solution

• Reduced operational costs and vendor lock-in: Unifying VMs and containers on a single platform improves efficiency. Based on open-source KVM and KubeVirt, Red Hat OpenShift Virtualisation offers flexibility without proprietary restrictions.

• Accelerated application delivery: Pre-validated systems and Hitachi’s Storage Plug-in for Containers (HSPC) simplify VM and container deployment, enabling dynamic, persistent storage scaling.

• Enterprise-grade resilience: VSP One is designed for continuous uptime and 100% data availability, ensuring mission-critical workloads stay online.

• End-to-end automation and visibility: Built-in observability and automation tools enhance security, policy consistency, and proactive issue resolution across hybrid environments.

Strengthening the Red Hat–Hitachi collaboration

This latest launch builds on an expanding partnership between the two companies. Earlier this year, they enhanced the Red Hat OpenShift migration toolkit for virtualisation, introducing storage offloading for cold migrations powered by VSP One.

This technology shifts the data-copying workload from the server and network to the storage array itself — significantly reducing downtime during migration. Hitachi Vantara was among the first to have its offload driver reach technology preview status, reinforcing its leadership in hybrid cloud innovation.

Looking ahead

As enterprises accelerate digital transformation, the combined power of Red Hat’s open hybrid cloud platform and Hitachi Vantara’s resilient infrastructure provides a practical, future-ready path for modernisation.

By helping customers migrate smoothly, cut costs, and maintain flexibility, the partnership is setting the foundation for next-generation hybrid cloud infrastructure that is scalable, open, and resilient by design.