How Red Hat, IBM and Arctera make Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization work with enterprise storage

Many organizations need a new home for their virtual machine (VM) workloads. Whether due to pricing changes, vendor shifts or expiring support for enterprise platforms, they often need to migrate quickly and with low risk, without disrupting what's already working. Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, a function of Red Hat OpenShift, provides a modern alternative for those ready to move from an older virtualization platform. IT teams can migrate and maintain existing workloads reliably, offering consistent operations and management across cloud, on-premises and edge environments. With OpenShift, they gain a modern application platform allowing them to run VMs and container workloads side-by-side on a single, unified system.

This flexibility is possible because of KubeVirt, the open source project that brings VM support into Kubernetes, which OpenShift is based upon. OpenShift Virtualization also leverages the proven Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) KVM hypervisor to manage and run VMs on OpenShift.

Organizations looking to migrate their VMs from their traditional virtualization platform often face a major sticking point: storage. Many companies still rely on enterprise storage systems—trusted, high-performance arrays that have powered their critical workloads for years. But as these companies shift toward modern platforms like OpenShift Virtualization and Kubernetes-based solutions, these storage systems, designed for the interaction patterns of traditional application paradigms, can encounter friction when integrating with the CSI-based communication model of Kubernetes platforms

Red Hat’s collaborations with IBM and Arctera offer a solution. Instead of forcing customers to replace their storage infrastructure and adopt Kubernetes-native storage, these integrations allow traditional storage systems to connect with OpenShift Virtualization. This makes it easier to adopt modern virtualization and application platforms, using your existing investment in existing storage architectures.

Let’s look at how these partnerships help bridge the gap between old and new.

The storage challenge

A significant hurdle in adopting OpenShift Virtualization often lies in integrating existing enterprise storage systems. Traditional Storage Area Networks (SANs) that utilize Fibre Channel or iSCSI protocols were not originally designed to interface with the dynamic nature of Kubernetes environments. These systems frequently lack native support for the Container Storage Interface (CSI), a standard that enables Kubernetes to dynamically manage storage resources. Consequently, they may struggle with providing essential Kubernetes features such as shared volume access, dynamic provisioning and efficient snapshotting, all critical for operations like live migration, high availability and data protection within OpenShift Virtualization. 

This incompatibility can force IT teams to either undertake costly storage infrastructure replacements or face operational challenges and performance limitations when attempting to leverage their legacy storage with modern Kubernetes-based platforms.

Both IBM and Arctera offer solutions that help bridge this enterprise storage gap.

Bridging the gap: Integrated solutions

Red Hat's collaborations with IBM and Arctera provide distinct but complementary solutions to integrate existing enterprise storage with OpenShift Virtualization. While each offers unique capabilities, they share a common goal of enabling organizations to adopt a modern virtualization platform without abandoning significant investments in traditional storage infrastructure.

Benefits of integrated enterprise storage architecture

• Leverage existing storage investments: Avoid costly and disruptive rip-and-replace projects by utilizing your current Fibre Channel or iSCSI arrays
• Enable Kubernetes-native storage features: Bring essential CSI capabilities to your enterprise storage, allowing for dynamic provisioning, simplified management and integration with Kubernetes workflows
• Support VM operations: Facilitate critical VM functionalities within OpenShift Virtualization, such as live migration and failover, through shared volume access
• Simplify storage management: Integrate storage tasks into standard Kubernetes workflows, streamlining operations
• Reduce risk and lower costs: Modernize your infrastructure on your terms, minimizing the financial and operational risks associated with migration

Building upon these common advantages, a closer examination of the specific capabilities offered by IBM and Arctera reveals how each partner uniquely addresses these challenges.

IBM and Red Hat: Making enterprise storage work for OpenShift

IBM Fusion Access for SAN is a solution engineered to bridge the gap between enterprise block storage and Kubernetes environments like OpenShift. The solution is built upon the proven and highly scalable IBM Storage Scale technology, renowned for its performance and data management capability with a strong heritage in high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) workloads. 

Fusion Access for SAN connects to external block storage (Fibre Channel or iSCSI), creates a clustered, global file system across this storage using IBM Storage Scale, and then employs a comprehensive CSI driver to expose a rich set of Kubernetes-native storage features. This architecture transforms traditional block storage into a dynamic, feature-rich storage solution for OpenShift.

"IBM Fusion Access represents a breakthrough in storage technology that bridges the gap between traditional virtualization and modern cloud-native environments. IBM and Red Hat have collaborated closely on this technology to enable enterprises to leverage their existing SAN infrastructure while delivering cloud-native flexibility. Together, we're empowering organizations to accelerate their modernization journey without sacrificing the reliability and performance they depend on." - Sam Werner, Vice President, IBM Storage

Arctera and Red Hat: Software-defined access to enterprise arrays

Similarly, Arctera InfoScale provides a software layer that makes traditional block storage work smoothly with Kubernetes. It also supports shared access, snapshots, backup and dynamic provisioning. But it’s especially strong in making storage available across multiple nodes, key for running high-availability VMs.

Arctera InfoScale simplifies storage management for OpenShift Virtualization by creating a distributed storage layer accessible by all nodes. It provides high availability and live migration for VMs without additional hardware dependencies. InfoScale's efficient snapshots and integrated backups protect VM data, enabling fast recovery while minimizing storage overhead. This solution lets enterprises maintain continuous uptime and flexibility as they modernize their virtual environments.

"InfoScale is uniquely positioned to accelerate the journey for customers adopting not only Kubernetes and OpenShift but also transforming their hypervisor and virtualization strategies. As investment in enterprise storage remains steady, maintaining a consistent management paradigm is critical to controlling infrastructure CapEx. InfoScale enables customers to fully exploit their existing storage assets, thereby minimizing the disruption that typically accompanies major platform changes." - Joseph D'angelo,  Director Product Management, Arctera.io

What’s in it for IT teams?

By closely partnering with IBM and Arctera, Red Hat helps customers avoid one of the biggest blockers to modernization while keeping costs in check. These collaborations allow organizations to leverage their existing storage investments, eliminating the need for costly replacements. Furthermore, they enable the use of Kubernetes-native features for VMs while improving their availability and mobility through shared storage access. This facilitates a smoother and faster transition to OpenShift Virtualization, fostering confidence that trusted VM workloads are running on a modern, enterprise-grade platform ready for both present needs and future advancements.

A smarter way to modernize

Not every company is ready to move everything to containers overnight. Some will keep using VMs for years to come. OpenShift Virtualization supports that. And with support from partners like IBM and Arctera, customers can keep using the storage systems they know and trust.

These Red Hat partnerships reflect a broader strategy to help companies modernize on their own terms. These integrations reduce risk, lower costs and make the shift to OpenShift more practical for organizations with deep investments in existing infrastructure.

Learn more

If you're planning a move to OpenShift Virtualization or are already using it and want to fully leverage your existing enterprise storage, take a closer look at these integrations from IBM and Arctera. They might be the missing piece in your modernization plan.

Visit Red Hat, IBM Fusion, or Arctera to learn more about OpenShift Virtualization and how you can connect it to your existing enterprise storage.