Fed Up With Virtualization Audits? Hitachi, Red Hat Built an Exit Strategy

Chief data officers drowning in enterprise virtualization challenges just got thrown a potential lifeline. Hitachi Vantara and Red Hat have launched an integrated solution that directly addresses what’s become a budget-crushing pain point: rising hypervisor costs and the compliance nightmares that come with proprietary virtualization platforms.

According to recent survey data, 73% of enterprises have faced vendor audits, with more than a third citing licensing compliance as their organization’s top challenge. For CDOs managing sprawling data estates, these audits can be expensive diversions from actual innovation work.

The new offering combines Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization with Hitachi Vantara’s Virtual Storage Platform One (VSP One), enabling organizations to run virtual machines and containers on a single platform. Translation: fewer redundant systems, lower licensing costs, and one less vendor ecosystem to manage.

“Organizations across industries are looking to modernize IT infrastructure while avoiding vendor lock-in and controlling costs,” said Dan McConnell, senior vice president of product management and enterprise infrastructure at Hitachi Vantara. The solution aims to “simplify migration, reduce complexity, and accelerate application delivery on a modern hybrid cloud foundation.”

For CDOs, the compelling proposition is choice. Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization is built on KVM and KubeVirt, open-source technologies that don’t tie you to a single vendor's roadmap or pricing whims. That’s a significant departure from traditional proprietary hypervisors that have increasingly flexed their pricing power.

The technical architecture matters here. The solution includes pre-validated reference configurations for high availability across stretched Red Hat OpenShift clusters. VSP One's Global Active Device (GAD) technology enables active-active data access across multiple sites, supporting disaster avoidance and continuous operations. An optional third-site quorum can be deployed in public cloud or isolated sites for maximum resilience.

Alior Bank, a Polish financial institution, is already a customer. “Our goal was to build a future-ready IT platform that supports growth while ensuring resilience and performance, which was paramount,” said Piotr Krzak, the bank’s chief technology officer. “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 migration tooling is particularly relevant for CDOs facing pressure to modernize legacy environments without operational disruption. Earlier this year, the companies enhanced the Red Hat OpenShift migration toolkit with a storage offloading feature for cold migrations, powered by VSP One. This moves the data-copying workload from servers and networks to the storage array itself, significantly accelerating migration while reducing downtime.

VSP One also provides unified data storage for block, file, and object storage across on-premises and cloud environments. For CDOs juggling multi-cloud strategies while maintaining data visibility and governance, achieving a consistent storage experience across deployment models is non-trivial.

“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,” said Stefanie Chiras, Ph.D., senior vice president of partner ecosystem success at Red Hat. “Together with Hitachi Vantara’s powerful infrastructure, we are enabling our customers to reduce costs, consolidate operations, and build more resilient, cloud-native infrastructure.”

Bottom line

The solution’s ability to eliminate duplicate virtualization and container environments directly impacts CDO budgets. Fewer infrastructure layers mean reduced hardware requirements, lower software licensing costs, and simplified operations — all while maintaining the enterprise-grade resilience that mission-critical workloads demand.

For CDOs wrestling with virtualization vendor audits and escalating costs, this partnership offers a concrete path toward greater flexibility and cost control without sacrificing availability or performance.

Image credit: iStockphoto/ra2studio