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Hitachi Vantara and Red Hat Collaboration

Hitachi Vantara LLC, a subsidiary of Hitachi, has taken a significant step forward in hybrid cloud technology by announcing its partnership with Red Hat. This collaboration brings forth a new integrated solution, combining Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization with Hitachi's Virtual Storage Platform One (VSP One). The implications of this integration are tremendous, enabling organizations to simplify the migration of virtual machines (VMs), minimize vendor lock-in, and reduce the time required for system transitions in production environments.

The Context of Change

In light of rising costs associated with traditional virtualization licenses, many organizations find themselves facing increased pressure to modernize their IT infrastructure. A recent survey revealed alarming trends: approximately 73% of companies have been subjected to software license audits, with a significant number citing overly complex license management as their foremost challenge. The rising costs and limited flexibility of legacy systems are propelling businesses to explore innovative solutions.

Solution Overview

The newly launched solution by Hitachi Vantara addresses these challenges by integrating Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization capabilities with VSP One. By utilizing pre-validated reference architectures and high-performance migration tools, organizations can migrate from legacy platforms more efficiently and rapidly. Furthermore, VSP One delivers multi-site failover capabilities, ensuring continuous operation even during failures. Notably, VSP One allows for simultaneous execution of VMs and containers, eliminating the need for separate virtualization infrastructures, thereby reducing hardware, software license, and operational costs.

In addition, this platform offers a comprehensive data storage solution that spans on-premises systems and cloud environments. This integration enhances data visibility and ensures a consistent operational experience regardless of data location.

Insights from Industry Leaders

Dan McConnell, Senior Vice President of Product Management and Enterprise Infrastructure at Hitachi Vantara, emphasized the need for organizations to reduce dependency on specific vendors while effectively managing costs amid modernization efforts. He stated, "Combining Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization with Hitachi Vantara's robust VSP One infrastructure simplifies migrations, reduces complexity, and accelerates application delivery on a modern hybrid cloud foundation. Our customers seek options free from complexity, cost, and vendor lock-in, and we deliver on those demands."

The new solution adopts a reference architecture developed collaboratively to ensure high availability in distributed Red Hat OpenShift clusters. It employs Global Active Device (GAD) technology for active-active data access across multiple sites, bolstering disaster recovery and operational continuity. The managed support of Red Hat OpenShift master nodes in public clouds or isolated sites further maximizes the resilience of availability zones.

Real-World Applications

Prominent financial institutions, including Alior Bank, have already experienced the advantages of this new solution. Faced with soaring license fees and limited flexibility in its legacy environment, Alior Bank successfully transitioned to Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization on VSP One.

Alior Bank's Chief Technology Officer, Piotr Krzak, has remarked, "Our goal was to build a forward-looking IT platform that supports growth while ensuring resilience and performance. Thanks to the tight collaboration between Red Hat and Hitachi Vantara, we have built an integrated high-availability environment that accelerates innovation and enhances our services to customers."

Key Advantages of the Solution

The Hitachi Vantara solution, powered by Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, offers several key benefits for organizations looking to modernize and migrate from traditional virtualization platforms:

1. Cost Reduction and Elimination of Vendor Lock-In: By integrating VMs and containers on a single platform, organizations can enhance operational efficiency and potentially lower costs. Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, based on KVM and KubeVirt, also provides a broad choice and flexibility through open-source innovations.

2. Accelerated Application Delivery and Migration: The integrated and pre-validated systems enable faster deployment of VMs and containers. The Storage Plug-in for Containers (HSPC) ensures dynamic, persistent storage scaling without over-provisioning.

3. Enterprise-Grade Resiliency: VSP One is engineered for continuous uptime, high data availability, and support for mission-critical workloads.

4. End-to-End Automation and Visibility: By combining Red Hat OpenShift’s integrated monitoring and automation tools with Hitachi Vantara’s intelligent infrastructure management, organizations can achieve consistent policy adherence, proactive issue resolution, and secure operations across hybrid cloud environments.

Future Directions

Dr. Stefanie Chiras, Senior Vice President of Partner Ecosystem Success at Red Hat, emphasized the critical nature of enabling IT leaders to reassess traditional virtualization platforms without disrupting ongoing operations. She noted, "Red Hat OpenShift is built on industry-leading hybrid cloud application platforms and open standards, supporting VM and container portability across on-premises, public clouds, and edge environments. Coupled with Hitachi Vantara's robust infrastructure, customers can optimize costs and streamline operations, preparing for future challenges with a resilient cloud-native infrastructure."

The announcement of this collaboration is representative of Hitachi Vantara and Red Hat's ongoing commitment to innovation, which this year also saw the update of their virtualization migration toolkit for Red Hat OpenShift. This toolkit features storage offload capabilities for cold migration, enhancing efficiency and significantly reducing workload times by transferring the data copy burden from servers and networks to storage during cold migrations.

As the rollout of this solution is set to commence in Japan by the end of December, both companies are prepared to further drive innovation in hybrid cloud solutions and VSP One offerings.

For further details on Hitachi Vantara’s hybrid cloud solutions and VSP One, visit their official website.