NetApp claims faster backup and recovery for Red Hat OpenShift VMs

NetApp claims backup and recovery operations complete faster on Red Hat's OpenShift container and virtual machine platform when carried out by NetApp arrays.

OpenShift virtualized environments are growing in size and number. According to Red Hat's "The state of virtualization" report, backup methods that rely on scanning full virtual machine (VM) disks can lead to longer backup windows, unpredictable recovery timelines, and increased operational risk. Block-level change tracking can significantly reduce the backup data stream's size compared to full VM disk copying.

Dallas Olson, NetApp's chief commercial officer, said: "NetApp's latest innovations with Red Hat enable predictable backup and recovery behavior even as the VM environment grows. Customers can now migrate, operate, and protect large‑scale VM and container environments on Red Hat OpenShift with greater speed, predictability, and operational confidence."

NetApp and Red Hat have collaborated to introduce a product with a lengthy name: NetApp Backup and Recovery for Red Hat OpenShift and OpenShift Virtualization on NetApp ONTAP storage. This accelerates backups and restores with incremental-forever backups providing changed block tracking (CBT), storage efficiency preservation, and compute offload. There is "comprehensive automation enabling VM-granular protection and recovery workflows along with resource transformations to accelerate recovery times." The companies say these features avoid data rehydration during backups and reduce compute overhead for backup operations.

NetApp is also previewing a disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) offering for OpenShift and OpenShift Virtualization, with orchestrated disaster recovery for Kubernetes‑based VMs. It "delivers simple, low-cost disaster protection for virtualized workloads on NetApp ONTAP storage with intuitive, guided disaster recovery failover and fallback workflows."

We understand Veeam's Kasten business unit offers CBT for OpenShift, as do Trilio, Storware, and Velero. Commvault has an early adopter program for protecting VMs on OpenShift Virtualization using Commvault Kubernetes.

NetApp has also announced that Trident, its open source, fully supported, CSI-compliant storage orchestrator designed for Kubernetes, is now faster and more scalable thanks to parallel execution of operations in the Trident controller for Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP.

To learn more about NetApp's collaboration with Red Hat, visit the NetApp booth #538 at Red Hat Summit 2026, May 11-14 in Atlanta, Georgia, and/or read a blog.