Accelerating modern virtualization infrastructure in 9 months

It’s no surprise that many organizations are reevaluating their existing virtualization platforms due to a variety of factors, including but not limited to rising virtualization costs and disruptive licensing changes. However, replacing a traditional virtualization platform with an identical hypervisor layer often does little to solve tomorrow’s business problems. Forward-thinking enterprises are recognizing that if they are going to go through the disruption of moving long-standing workloads anyway, they need to make the migration count.

Landing on a vendor-agnostic, modern virtualization platform

This is the exact strategic mindset that recently drove Alior Bank, one of the leading financial institutions in Central Europe, to embark on a transformative 9-month migration journey to Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization. Like many in the financial services industry, Alior Bank operates under a strict, heavily regulated banking framework influenced by strict compliance mandates like the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA). For their leadership team, future-proofing the bank meant building a robust, resilient infrastructure stack that is entirely vendor-agnostic. They required an agile environment where they could run and protect virtual machine (VM) workloads on premise today, while maintaining the flexibility to shift applications across private clouds or major hyperscalers like Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud in the future.

To turn this vision into a reality, Alior Bank selected Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization as their modern virtualization platform of choice. OpenShift Virtualization offers the bank an enterprise-grade foundation capable of running virtual machines alongside modern, containerized applications on a single, unified platform. This unified model completely eliminates the overhead of managing parallel infrastructure stacks. Rather than treating this as a simple, tactical hypervisor swap, the bank aligned the migration directly to its forward-looking modernization strategy. 

Additionally, Alior Bank recognized that these goals required more than technology selection. By working closely with Red Hat and Hitachi Vantara, they were able to create a migration strategy that balanced operational stability, regulatory requirements, and long-term modernization objectives. This collaboration allowed the bank to accelerate virtualization transformation while reducing risk and preserving future deployment flexibility.

Piotr Krzak, CTO of Alior Bank, notes, “We want to deliver a technology that is not only efficient from the point of view of banking but also cost-effective. We are going to an agnostic solution, containers, and this is something that we believe will be the future.” By landing on OpenShift, the bank can use the exact same CI/CD pipelines to deploy and operate their entire environment, giving them the freedom to deploy across on-premise and hybrid cloud without expensive re-engineering.

Digital transformation with Red Hat and Hitachi Vantara

Alior Bank accomplished its rapid digital transformation by working hand-in-hand with Red Hat and its strategic partner, Hitachi Vantara. By doing so, the bank avoided a massive hardware refresh by leveraging their existing, highly active infrastructure and stretched persistent storage volumes across multiple data centers. Through deep ecosystem collaboration between Hitachi Vantara and Red Hat engineers, the bank used Hitachi Vantara’s Container Storage Interface (CSI) and the migration toolkit for virtualization from Red Hat’s Storage Offload capability. This enabled the bank to warm-migrate and validate highly demanding, resource-intensive workloads quickly, safely, and with minimal impact on active production environments, ensuring uninterrupted business operations and continuity.

Ultimately, Alior Bank approached their virtualization migration plan strategically and incrementally. Rather than attempting an all-at-once platform swap across their entire footprint of 5,000 VMs, the bank prioritized immediate risk mitigation and stability by 1st establishing a robust operational baseline. They focused initial migration phases on their Linux-based testing, development, and QA environments, fine-tuning their automated CI/CD backup pipelines and role-based access control (RBAC) security frameworks before rolling out critical production and Windows workloads in later stages. 

Alior Bank has already completed the 1st phase of their migration and modernization journey and is on track to slash its legacy virtualization costs by 60% and achieve a full return on investment (ROI) in just 2 and a half years. By landing on OpenShift, Alior Bank has successfully broken free from legacy constraints and positioned themselves for future success with containers, microservices, and AI-driven applications.