Hitachi Vantara is trying to attract wannabe VMware leavers by providing vSAN replacement with VSP One and vSphere with Red Hat OpenShift.
The background to this is, of course, Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware and its subsequent VMware licensing changes. Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization (RHOSV) uses the open source KubeVirt control plane to integrate Kubernetes container orchestration with server virtualization using the KVM hypervisor. OpenShift itself is a commercial platform. The idea is to migrate VMware systems over to RHOSV, using KubeVirt, and enable containerized app development and support as well, with VSP One providing the underlying storage needed and replacing vSAN. It features a unified data storage offering for block, file, and object storage across on-premises systems and the public cloud.
Dan McConnell, SVP product management and enterprise infrastructure at Hitachi Vantara, stated: “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.”
The combined VSP One-RHOSV offering includes a “pre-validated reference architecture and a VM migration tool that simplifies and accelerates the transition from legacy platforms.” It “allows organizations to 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 reduces hardware, software licensing, and operational costs.”
This reference architecture uses stretched Red Hat OpenShift clusters and features VSP One’s Global Active Device (GAD) technology, which enables active-active data access across multiple sites. There are enhanced CSI drivers, and the architecture supports disaster avoidance, continuous operations, and seamless workload mobility across geographically distributed sites. There is an optional third-site quorum with Red Hat OpenShift master node support in public cloud or isolated sites which enables maximum availability zone resiliency.
Hitachi Vantara says the combined offering will bring reduced operational costs and less vendor lock-in, faster app delivery and migration, continuous uptime, 100 percent data availability, and support for mission-critical workloads. The company tells us there will be improved policy consistency, proactive issue resolution, and secure operations across hybrid environments, through the integrated Red Hat OpenShift observability and automation tools and Hitachi Vantara’s “intelligent infrastructure management.”
Earlier this year, Hitachi Vantara and Red Hat announced an update to the Red Hat OpenShift migration toolkit for virtualization, which includes a storage offloading feature for cold migrations, powered by VSP One. Allowing storage offloading during a cold migration can significantly accelerate the process by moving the data-copying workload from the server and network to the storage array itself, reducing downtime and maintaining operational continuity. Hitachi Vantara says it’s the primary driver for the development of this feature, and one of the first to have its offload driver reach a technology preview stage.
Dell did a deal with Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization a year ago. Infinidat and Veeam did a backup-focused deal with Red Hat OpenShift in March this year. Alternative VMware storage migration destinations include Nutanix and Pure Storage.
Get more information on Hitachi Vantara with Red Hat OpenShift offerings here with a downloadable eBook and also a solution brief.
