At Hitachi Vantara, we have been on a journey with some of the key vendors leveraging kubernetes to bring a strong virtualization infrastructure for virtual machines in addition to a container orchestration experience to meet the realities of our current and soon to be new enterprise customers. One of those partners is Red Hat and we are participating and presenting our latest solutions at their Red Hat Summit 2026 this week. For Hitachi Vantara, we have key segments we serve including financial, healthcare, federal, technology and other key segments where expectations are high both from a reliable VSP One data storage services and/or integrated solution experience including multi datacenter availability, recoverability and observability.
As these customers evaluate options to both move from a traditional vendor virtualization approach and/or meet new AI workloads operational needs, Hitachi has been collaborating with Red Hat every week to ensure those advanced storage automation and observability capabilities are natively available in kubernetes stack such as Red Hat OpenShift / Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization. Who was the first to introduce 10X faster storage offload migration with MTV. Well, we didn't stop there. One of those new areas we addressed was to have an answer to the statement made by our customers" , "but I need something similar to VMware Site Recovery Manager" to automate protection and DR / DR testing for any virtualization stack on enterprise storage.
With that, we have released Hitachi Vantara CSI software v3.18 this week. This was a significant release as we have brought to market two important additions. First, a new capability we call CSI-DR Operator which has now gone GA after a brief technology preview period. Second, we are introducing a new CSI-dynamic console plugin for OpenShift which addresses key asks from our customers around storage observability and UI driven DR orchestration of DR Operator. Both are components in the overall Hitachi Vantara CSI software package, which is natural extension of our VSP360 infrastructure management but surfaced inside these native stacks with that platform context..
CSI-DR Operator
Imagine having 2 OpenShift clusters (or any Kubernetes distributions with Kubevirt) that takes advantage of volumes from enterprise storage. As VMs or containers are created, you want persistent volumes (PVs) data for those VMs/containers residing on enterprise storage to be automatically protected and replicated in consistency groups to the 2nd cluster including necessary kubernetes or virtual machine custom resource information. This allows the workload to recover/restart on the 2nd cluster in the event of planned/unplanned issues in one datacenter. The CSI-DR operator is available in our HV CSI GitHub repo under the hrpc-dr operator component. Typically, the sample policy can be imported into your cluster and updated to protect tagged VMs/deployments with labels or namespace(s) or individual PVCs to be protected. Our tech preview customers would align a DR policy to a namespace and every VM/container in that namespace got automatically protected. But that is not all you asked for.. Our VMware customers use VMware SRM with Hitachi adapters which has reasonable intuitive UI to initiate operations, visualize status of protection or handle the workload failover . Today, so does OpenShift. This release includes a dynamic console plugin that surfaces a dashboard tab inside OpenShift UI. Per the screenshots below, you can now not only get storage observability but also UI driven protection and DR orchestration for your VMs and containers in the CSi-Dynamic Console Plugin. We also squeezed in snapshot management via the console plugin as well as we were knocking out AHA feature requests from our installed base.
Selecting DR Policy from the volumes tab inside the new console plugin for OpenShift present this view
Clicking the DR Policy tab allows you to manage the policy and change the state (e.g change dr policy state to failover)
CSI- Dynamic Console Plugin
The other key ask we encountered was observability (and of course UI experience over DR Operations which I covered above). As teams made the transition from a LUN-datastore model to K8s-PV model, visibility similar to what we provide for our VMware-VSP One customers with vROPS or VCF Operations was high on the list. This CSI 3.18 release introduces a dynamic console which appears as a Hitachi Vantara CSI tab within the native storageClass pane in OpenShift UI. I will leave the next 5 screenshots with some of the annotations I added.to speak for themselves
https://www.hitachivantara.com/en-us/company/events-and-webinars/vsp-one-red-hat-openshift
This was a significant 3.x release. 3,18.1 release is available now and 3.18.2 will release in June timeframe with all console plugin features in GA status. Cody and I will also test the demo gods with live demos of the above in a expanding breakout session at Red Hat Summit this week as we discuss how Alior Bank is 'banking" on these features and stretched clusters on their OpenShift Journey. Register to grab the remaining 49 seats of 200 !
If at Red Hat Summit 2026 in Atlanta, check out Hitachi Vantara Booth 113 where you can review not only this CSI 3.18 release but discuss all our VSP One Solutions with Red Hat across sustainable responsible AI, modernized virtualization, cyber resilience and trusted hybrid cloud .
Hitachi Vantara at Red Hat Summit: Questions: email us at redhat@hitachivantara,com
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