NetApp has announced new data management capabilities optimised for Red Hat OpenShift, introducing block-level change tracking and disaster recovery features designed to address the growing complexity of enterprise virtualised environments running on Kubernetes.

The updates target a core operational challenge: as Red Hat OpenShift environments scale, backup methods that scan full VM disks create unpredictable recovery timelines and increased operational risk. The new capabilities replace full-disk scanning with incremental-forever backups using change block tracking, reducing backup windows and improving the predictability of recovery operations.

Four New Capabilities

The release covers four specific updates. NetApp Backup and Recovery for Red Hat OpenShift now supports VM-granular protection with comprehensive automation and resource transformations to accelerate recovery times. NetApp Disaster Recovery, now in public preview, delivers orchestrated disaster recovery for Kubernetes-based VMs as a service, with guided failover and fallback workflows on NetApp ONTAP storage.

A third update makes Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization with Red Hat OpenShift on Google Cloud generally available, with certified support via Google Cloud NetApp Volumes and Trident CSI driver, enabling organisations to run both VMs and containers in the cloud with simplified operations. Finally, NetApp Trident Parallelism improves scalability by allowing storage operations to execute concurrently rather than serially for Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP and Google Cloud NetApp Volumes environments.

“When IT teams are faced with slow scanning and backup processes, they’re unable to meet recovery point and recovery time objectives. NetApp’s latest innovations with Red Hat enable predictable backup and recovery behavior even as the VM environment grows.”
— Dallas Olson, Chief Commercial Officer, NetApp

The announcements were timed to coincide with Red Hat Summit 2026, held 11-14 May in Atlanta. According to Red Hat’s own research, 90% of organisations report that virtualisation supports innovation, and 71% have over half their IT infrastructure virtualised, underlining the scale of the data protection challenge the updates address.