NetApp and Red Hat Expand OpenShift Data Protection for VM and Kubernetes Workloads

NetApp and Red Hat have introduced new offerings that bring NetApp backup and disaster recovery services to Red Hat OpenShift and OpenShift Virtualization.

Today, the companies announced that the expanded offerings are designed to give Red Hat customers stronger protection for large-scale virtual machine environments, as well as on-premises and cloud infrastructure. The companies said the new capabilities are built to work closely with Red Hat OpenShift, helping customers run Kubernetes and VM workloads with greater reliability and stronger recovery options.

NetApp Backup and Recovery for Red Hat OpenShift and OpenShift Virtualization provides data protection services for OpenShift applications on NetApp ONTAP storage, according to NetApp. The service provides Change Block Tracking (CBT), storage efficiency preservation, and compute offload capabilities that reduce compute overhead during backup operations. In addition, NetApp Backup and Recovery now protects VMs on OpenShift using comprehensive automation that delivers VM-granular protection and recovery workflows.

The update also extends NetApp’s OpenShift data protection story from backup into orchestrated disaster recovery for Kubernetes-based VMs. The disaster recovery-as-a-service is now available in preview and allows customers to use NetApp Disaster Recovery for their Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization environments, according to NetApp.

Additionally, the new NetApp Trident Parallelism capabilities for Red Hat customers allow NetApp Trident to support parallel execution of operations in the Trident controller for Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP environments. The Trident Parallelism capabilities provide improved scalability and remove storage bottlenecks by enabling Trident to execute storage operations concurrently rather than serially, according to NetApp.

The latest NetApp and Red Hat collaboration builds on earlier collaboration by the two vendors, including an IT modernization move in October 2025 tied to Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization.

Through Channel Partners or Direct from NetApp

Alvaro Celis, NetApp's chief partner and ecosystem officer, told ChannelE2E that the new NetApp products with Red Hat will be available directly from NetApp or through channel partners, including deployment and managed services. 

"As channel partners and MSPs help enterprises modernize and scale their virtualized environments on-premises and in the cloud, they need to reassure customers that they will have the resilience and agility required to reduce operational risk," said Celis. "The updates NetApp announced to support Red Hat OpenShift environments for virtual machines and Kubernetes give partners and customers more granular control to migrate and restore virtualized environments on Red Hat, boosting customer confidence."

Through this new collaboration, NetApp is helping to make Red Hat OpenShift a more attractive option for enterprises looking to modernize their virtual environments, said Celis. "Channel partners and MSPs can take advantage of the market opportunity as enterprises examine their virtualization strategies, and these capabilities give them more flexibility to offer the right solution that matches their customers' goals and requirements," he said.  

Analyst Jack E. Gold, president and principal analyst with J.Gold Associates, LLC., told ChannelE2E that enterprises today expect these capabilities from their application and services providers.

"Most enterprises understand that having a virtualized environment for the data and applications is critical to taking maximum advantage of the hybrid cloud environment," said Gold. "Adding additional backup and recovery capabilities improves resilience and enables a more diverse and flexible capability for organizations that need to be able to make changes whenever necessary, easily."

Another analyst, Shelly Kramer, principal analyst with Kramer&Co., told ChannelE2E that the block-level Change-Block Tracking (CBT) for OpenShift Virtualization that is being introduced here is particularly significant for customers across hybrid and multicloud environments.

"Without question, the problem it solves is real," she said. "When virtualized environments scale, traditional full-disk scanning backup approaches quickly become operationally untenable. Backup windows balloon, recovery timelines are no longer predictable, and IT teams can often find themselves unable to meet RPO/RTO commitments. That is not a theoretical problem; it is one of the primary friction points enterprises are navigating as they scale OpenShift Virtualization deployments."

This is also a beneficial new feature for channel partners, "especially for MSPs that are managing enterprise OpenShift environments or supporting VMware-to-OpenShift migrations, which are understandably very active right now," said Kramer.  "The DR-as-a-service packaging, with guided failover and failback workflows, helps lower the expertise bar for MSPs. It allows them to deliver disaster recovery at margin, and predictable backup/recovery behavior at scale means they can be confident in making those SLA commitments."