Bridging Legacy and Cloud-Native: A New Path with Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated Deployed on Google Cloud and Google Cloud NetApp Volume

Why It Matters

The certification bridges the gap between legacy infrastructure and modern cloud‑native workloads, reducing operational complexity and cost for enterprises seeking digital transformation. It enables IT teams to protect critical applications while adopting Kubernetes best practices at scale.

Key Takeaways

• OpenShift Dedicated now supports NetApp Volumes for VM storage
• Unified platform runs containers and VMs side‑by‑side
• Red Hat manages Kubernetes complexity, reducing operational overhead
• Migration Toolkit and Ansible automate legacy VM lift‑and‑shift
• Enterprise‑grade NetApp storage delivers snapshots, replication, high performance

Pulse Analysis

Enterprises today wrestle with a dual reality: thriving cloud‑native container workloads alongside mission‑critical legacy virtual machines. Maintaining separate platforms for each creates tool sprawl, skill gaps, and inflated operational costs, slowing digital transformation. By certifying Google Cloud NetApp Volumes as a storage backend for OpenShift Virtualization, Red Hat offers a single, Kubernetes‑native environment where VMs and containers coexist, eliminating the need for parallel infrastructures and simplifying governance.

The combined offering of OpenShift Dedicated on Google Cloud and NetApp’s enterprise‑grade storage delivers a managed, high‑performance foundation for both stateful and stateless workloads. NetApp Volumes provide features such as instant snapshots, cross‑region replication, and resilient file services, meeting the stringent I/O demands of production VMs while integrating seamlessly with container storage interfaces. Red Hat’s managed service abstracts the underlying Kubernetes complexity, allowing IT teams to focus on application delivery rather than platform upkeep. Integrated migration utilities—including the Migration Toolkit for Virtualization and Ansible Automation Platform—further accelerate the lift‑and‑shift of legacy workloads, reducing migration risk and cost.

For CIOs and cloud strategists, this partnership translates into tangible business value: faster time‑to‑market for new services, lower total cost of ownership by retiring redundant infrastructure, and a clear, incremental path toward full cloud‑native adoption. The unified stack supports a GitOps‑driven operational model, enabling consistent CI/CD pipelines across containers and VMs. As organizations modernize at their own pace, the ability to run legacy and next‑gen applications on the same platform mitigates risk while unlocking the scalability and agility of the public cloud.