Across the industry, organizations are rapidly modernizing their application environments. A clear trend emerging from recent customer data is the accelerating adoption of Red Hat OpenShift running on Hitachi Vantara storage platforms.
Over the past year, customer deployments of OpenShift integrated with Hitachi storage have grown significantly, more than doubling in size. Even more compelling is the pace of change. Adoption is not just increasing, it is accelerating, with a noticeable inflection point beginning in early 2026.
Figure 1 Customer adoption of OpenShift Plug‑Ins on Hitachi Vantara storage continues to accelerate
Momentum is building
From late 2025 into early 2026, customer adoption followed a steady upward trajectory. Starting in January, however, the growth curve begins to steepen. This shift reflects a broader market transition as organizations move from initial experimentation to scaled deployments.
This type of acceleration is important. It signals that customers are gaining confidence in their architectures and are moving forward with production‑level implementations.
From proof of concept to production scale
One of the most important insights behind this trend is how customers are adopting OpenShift on Hitachi Vantara. Many begin with targeted use cases or smaller deployments, validating their approach. Over time, these environments expand across additional applications and teams.
This creates a clear land‑and‑expand pattern:
- Initial deployments validate the platform
- Success drives expansion into adjacent workloads
- Standardization follows as organizations scale
This behavior reflects a broader shift toward platform consistency and operational efficiency in hybrid cloud environments.
Real-world validation: Alior Bank’s journey
This trend is reinforced by real customer experiences shared at Red Hat Summit 2026, including insights from Alior Bank.
In a featured session, Alior Bank shared its nine‑month journey adopting Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization with Hitachi Vantara. The bank is modernizing its OpenShift platform to improve resilience, streamline operations, and confidently run business‑critical workloads across a hybrid architecture.
This is a powerful example of the broader trend:
- Organizations are actively modernizing virtualization environments
- OpenShift is becoming a strategic platform for both containers and virtualized workloads
- Customers are moving beyond pilots into operational, production‑ready deployments
The Alior Bank experience highlights what many customers are now doing at scale. They are not just adopting new platforms. They are transforming how they run their core systems.
Strong adoption in enterprise environments
Adoption is being led by large enterprise environments where performance, resilience, and scalability are critical. These organizations are increasingly standardizing on platforms that support both traditional and cloud‑native workloads.
At the same time, adoption is broadening across a wider range of deployment types, indicating strong relevance across industries and use cases.
A platform for modern applications and modernization
Customers are leveraging Hitachi Vantara storage alongside Red Hat OpenShift to support key initiatives such as:
- Application modernization
- Containerization of existing workloads
- Hybrid cloud platform standardization
- Virtualization modernization and migration
In particular, the ability to modernize virtualization environments and consolidate platforms is becoming a major driver, as organizations look to simplify operations and increase flexibility.
What this means for customers
The acceleration in adoption highlights a broader market shift. Organizations are no longer just exploring Kubernetes platforms. They are operationalizing them at scale.
For customers, this means:
- Proven architectures are emerging and scaling
- Platform choices today are becoming long‑term strategic decisions
- There is increasing value in aligning infrastructure with modern application platforms
Learn more and explore the experience
To explore these trends and customer stories in more detail, you can access the following resources:
Looking ahead
The continued growth of OpenShift deployments on Hitachi Vantara storage signals strong momentum heading into the rest of 2026. As more organizations transition to production environments and expand their use of container and virtualization platforms, the need for a reliable, scalable, and integrated data foundation becomes even more critical.
Customer stories like Alior Bank’s demonstrate that this is not just a trend. It is a shift in how enterprises are modernizing and running their most important workloads.
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