Enabling strategic growth and innovation with a pioneering move to Red Hat OpenShift

Overview

Challenge

• Escape VMware licensing costs and simplify operations by establishing a single platform for both virtual machines (VMs) and containers.

Solution

• Consolidate VM and container workloads on Red Hat OpenShift, with storage provided by an active-active cluster of Hitachi VSP One arrays.

Outcome

• Cut licensing costs by 60%, simplify management of workloads, ensure near-zero downtime, and support innovation.

Challenge

Founded in 2008, Alior Bank has grown to become a top-ten bank and one of the most recognized brands in Poland. In its vision for 2025-2027, Alior Bank aims to strengthen its market position through the delivery of new mobile and digital banking services, among other initiatives.

To support the technological innovation that these initiatives will require, the bank set out to modernize its IT infrastructure to improve agility, cost-structure, and resilience. One key strategic project was to migrate hundreds of virtual machine (VM) workloads from VMware to the Red Hat OpenShift platform.

Piotr Krzak, Chief Technology Officer at Alior Bank, explains: “Currently, we run everything from mission-critical systems to simple applications on VMware, but licensing costs are increasing rapidly. Across the bank, we are focusing on reducing the cost of our operations, to allow us to concentrate resources on innovation.”

By taking advantage of Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, Alior Bank would be able to run its VMs side-by-side with its containerized workloads on the same platform, which would simplify operations and optimize efficiency. However, as one of the first large enterprises in the world to migrate its VMs to Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, Alior Bank would be taking a step into the unknown.

“We weren’t moving to a technology that has matured for 10 years, where there are experienced engineers available to guide the migration; everything was new,” adds Piotr Krzak. “But we see ourselves as explorers, and we like to push the boundaries and embrace things that few other companies have attempted.”

Critical to the migration and the ongoing performance and reliability of the OpenShift workloads was a new storage environment. “Running containers and virtual machines together creates new challenges,” adds Piotr Krzak. “We would need exceptional performance as well as specific functionality under the hood to minimize project risk.”

Solution

To support the migration and maintain the Red Hat OpenShift platform moving forward, Alior Bank created detailed specifications for the storage layer, covering performance, disaster recovery, scalability, migration tools, and more. After assessing multiple vendors, the bank decided to continue its successful partnership with Hitachi Vantara.

Jacek Gazda, Head of Infrastructure Division at Alior Bank explains: “We have used Hitachi Vantara storage for many years, and we have built considerable knowledge and skills for managing their arrays within Alior Bank. Plus, we have an excellent relationship with the local support team in Poland. That gave us confidence to move ahead with this project.”

The full solution, built on a pre-validated reference architecture for Red Hat OpenShift, includes Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform One (VSP One) Block B26, VSP E1090 and VSP E990 arrays, along with customized migration tools. The arrays are deployed in a multi-site active-active cluster using Hitachi global-active device to enable stretched PVCs. Alior Bank will use Hitachi Vantara CSI, which will enable OpenShift to dynamically provision, manage and automate storage volumes from VSP One Storage. 

Alior Bank has successfully implemented the storage systems and is now migrating hundreds of VMs. Throughout the process, Hitachi Vantara has provided dedicated on-site technical support.

“In time, we will move the VMs that support our core and mobile banking and CRM platforms onto Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization,” adds Piotr Krzak. “You can’t simply use an off-the-shelf storage solution for this kind of project—it has taken detailed planning, best-in-class enterprise arrays, and unique functionality from both Red Hat and Hitachi Vantara.”

Outcome

With Hitachi Vantara, Alior Bank has a powerful solution to support the migration from VMware and to modernize its virtualized environment. For example, the Hitachi VSP arrays’ NVMe drives will ensure high performance for critical application and development workloads running on Red Hat OpenShift, supporting innovation and helping the bank achieve its strategic goals.

Jacek Gazda adds: “Consolidating VMs and containerized workloads on Red Hat and Hitachi Vantara systems will unlock significant efficiency gains and cut our management workloads. We expect to reduce our costs by around 60% by migrating from VMware, and to achieve a full return on investment on the project within two and a half years.”

Crucially, the active-active architecture will ensure near-zero downtime for both virtual machines and containerized workloads, as Piotr Krzak notes: “Running two sites in an active-active configuration will help to keep our client services online round the clock. It gives us greater resilience than a standard disaster recovery strategy with a primary and secondary data center.”

The Hitachi Vantara solutions also provide scalability and flexibility to support growth in OpenShift workloads. “We are standardizing our application development and deployment processes, so we can use the same approach for both virtual machines and containers moving forward,” adds Piotr Krzak. “The Hitachi Vantara solution gives us the tools to support agile application development and delivery.”

He concludes: “We are breaking new ground with Hitachi Vantara and Red Hat, doing something that could change the way we think about virtualization. Once we have proved the value of our approach, we expect many enterprises to adopt it. It is another successful chapter in our history of innovation.”