Dinesh Singh
Director, Product Solutions Marketing, Cloud Infrastructure and Business Applications
December 5, 2025
For years, virtualization quietly powered the world’s digital infrastructure. Enterprises and government agencies relied on trusted platforms to keep workloads stable, secure, and efficient. But now, the landscape is rapidly shifting.
Organizations are now looking for new capabilities in a virtualization platform, according to a new report by Red Hat, with 38% of companies desiring automation and AI-powered capabilities, and an anticipated 45% rise in the use of containers.
In the wake of recent changes with the legacy virtualization platforms, many enterprises and government agencies running older virtualization stacks are also facing a new reality: rising costs, tighter licensing controls, and growing uncertainty. IT leaders are challenged to modernize the tech stack without losing control, avoid lock-in, and still ensure enterprise resilience and performance.
Some 90% of organizations agree that virtualization supports innovation. The question is: what tools and technology are up to the task?
The new Hitachi Vantara and Red Hat solution is one offering organizations can use to modernize their virtualization strategy and future-proof their hybrid cloud environments. Generative AI will undoubtedly be a key contributor to simplifying virtualization management and operations, and successfully deploying GenAI will require a robust and flexible infrastructure.
The solution combines Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization with Hitachi Vantara’s Virtual Storage Platform One (VSP One) to create a flexible, open hybrid cloud foundation. This integrated solution helps enterprises move from proprietary hypervisors to a unified environment that runs both virtual machines (VMs) and containers side by side. With Red Hat OpenShift AI enabled, enterprises can develop and deploy AI-driven solutions efficiently across hybrid cloud environments, facilitating the creation and delivery of AI-enabled applications at scale with high reliability and security. Additionally, Red Hat OpenShift AI supports model serving and hosting, making real-time AI inference and integration seamless.
For organizations exploring alternatives to VMware, this partnership delivers an immediate business case:
Replatforming Without Sacrifice
For most organizations, modernization happens in production. Every minute of downtime or degraded performance carries a business cost. Historically, VM migration required moving terabytes of data across IP networks, consuming compute resources and extending maintenance windows. The new accelerated storage offload migration capability changes that paradigm entirely.
By shifting migration tasks to the storage layer, Hitachi Vantara and Red Hat eliminate network dependency and host overhead, resulting in faster, lower-risk transitions from VMware to Red Hat OpenShift. What once took weeks can now be done in days, without disrupting customer-facing operations.
From Legacy to Leading-Edge: The Alior Bank Way
Modernization doesn’t have to mean disruption. That’s what Alior Bank, a leading European financial institution, proved when they faced steep licensing hikes and limited flexibility in their legacy virtualization environment. The organization turned to Red Hat and Hitachi Vantara and built a unified, highly available infrastructure that boosted scalability, accelerated innovation, and ensured business continuity, all while containing costs.
Piotr Krzak, chief technology officer of Alior Bank, said “our goal was to build a future-ready IT platform that supports growth while ensuring resilience and performance, which was paramount. 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.”
Open Innovation, Trusted Partnership
As one of the top 10% contributors to Kubernetes globally, Hitachi Vantara brings deep expertise in open innovation and hybrid infrastructure. The company co-developed the storage offload technology now embedded in Red Hat’s MTV 2.9, and open-sourced it to benefit enterprises with diverse SAN environments.
That means you can modernize your virtualization strategy using your existing SAN infrastructure while unlocking the performance and flexibility of a modern hybrid cloud.
Every organization’s migration journey is different, but the goal is the same: speed, simplicity, and confidence.
Ready to evaluate your path off legacy virtualization? Schedule a complimentary modernization assessment with Hitachi Vantara to see how quickly you can replatform to Red Hat OpenShift, reduce costs, and accelerate your hybrid cloud transformation.
Increase agility, resilience and scalability. Learn more about Hitachi Vantara and Red Hat solutions.
Dinesh Singh is Director, Product Solutions Marketing, Cloud Infrastructure and Business Applications, Hitachi Vantara.
