Simplyblock Disrupts OpenShift Storage with Built-In Disaster Recovery

TELTOW, Germany – September 29, 2026 – The enterprise infrastructure landscape is undergoing a seismic shift. Following Broadcom's acquisition of VMware and subsequent overhauls to licensing models, CIOs have accelerated their search for viable alternatives. Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization has emerged as a leading destination, offering a unified Kubernetes platform for both containers and legacy virtual machines. Yet, a critical roadblock has stifled this migration: the absence of seamless, cost-effective equivalents to VMware's vMotion and Site Recovery Manager.

Today, Teltow-based software-defined storage startup Simplyblock is looking to demolish that roadblock. The company announced the integration of comprehensive business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) capabilities directly into its storage platform for OpenShift Virtualization. By delivering synchronous and asynchronous replication, live cluster-to-cluster volume migration, and S3-compatible off-site backups at the storage layer, the German firm is challenging both technical bottlenecks and the punitive licensing models of incumbent enterprise storage giants.

In an era where ransomware and geopolitical volatility mandate a "security-first" corporate strategy, infrastructure resilience is no longer an optional overlay; it is a core driver of market performance. Simplyblock’s release reflects this shift, treating data protection not as a premium add-on, but as an intrinsic property of the storage architecture.

Bridging the Post-VMware Migration Gap

For organizations looking to abandon legacy hypervisors, the appeal of OpenShift Virtualization—powered by the open-source KubeVirt project—is clear. It promises a single control plane for managing a modernized, cloud-native application stack alongside traditional VMs. However, enterprise IT directors have repeatedly hit a wall when attempting to replicate the robust, zero-downtime resilience they took for granted in the VMware ecosystem.

"Kubernetes and OpenShift are becoming increasingly popular. However, the lack of built-in business continuity and disaster recovery has made it difficult for many organizations to make the transition from hypervisors or hyperconverged infrastructure," noted Marc Staimer, CEO of Dragon Slayer Consulting. "CSI shared storage lacks the granularity, business continuity, and low-cost users are looking for. Simplyblock is the first to solve this problem."

Disaster recovery for stateful VMs on OpenShift Virtualization presents unique architectural challenges compared to legacy methods. In a traditional hypervisor environment, protecting a VM often means simply replicating a monolithic disk image. On Kubernetes, a virtual machine is a composite entity—a collection of persistent volumes, network configurations, and declarative YAML manifests. True recoverability requires capturing this entire application context. Many legacy backup tools fail to bridge this divide, leaving infrastructure teams to manually piece together metadata and storage state during a crisis.

Simplyblock’s latest release targets these exact pain points. The platform now supports synchronous metro replication across sites using distributed erasure coding in a stretch-cluster setup, achieving zero-Recovery Point Objective (RPO) business continuity. For wider geographic dispersal, it offers asynchronous delta-based replication with RPOs as low as one minute, complete with automated failback. Crucially, the platform introduces non-disruptive live forward volume replication between clusters, providing the vMotion-style workload mobility required for hardware refreshes and cluster relocations without application downtime.

Disrupting the Enterprise DR "Add-On Tax"

Beyond the technical achievements, Simplyblock’s most disruptive play is financial. In the traditional Kubernetes storage market, disaster recovery for stateful workloads is rarely included out of the box. Instead, enterprise DR software add-ons for OpenShift typically mandate per-worker-node licensing at both the primary and recovery sites. As clusters scale, this add-on tax frequently becomes the most expensive line item in the platform stack.

FinOps leaders and infrastructure architects have long lamented this model, noting that it forces organizations to treat storage, business continuity, and disaster recovery as disjointed infrastructure decisions requiring separate procurement cycles. Simplyblock eliminates this friction by bundling high-end BCDR directly into its core software-defined storage platform.

"OpenShift Virtualization gives enterprises a compelling path to modernize their VM infrastructure without abandoning the workloads they depend on," said Rob Pankow, CEO of Simplyblock. "However, running VMs in this new production environment requires resilient storage and a credible recovery strategy to succeed. By building DR and business continuity directly into simplyblock, we are providing a fully integrated storage platform that offers customers replication, recovery and off-site protection without them having to assemble a separate collection of products or purchase a separately licensed DR layer."

This unified approach radically alters the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) calculus for VM modernization. By stripping away the per-node DR licensing fees, Simplyblock presents a streamlined financial model that directly addresses the budget constraints driving the initial VMware exodus.

David vs. Goliath in Cloud-Native Storage

While Simplyblock’s press release touts the platform as the "first" software-defined storage for OpenShift Virtualization with these built-in capabilities, the competitive reality is more nuanced. The startup is stepping into an arena dominated by heavyweights like Red Hat, Pure Storage, and NetApp, all of whom have been aggressively developing their own cloud-native DR strategies.

Pure Storage’s Portworx, for example, has offered synchronous Metro-DR and asynchronous cross-region protection for OpenShift Virtualization for some time, alongside live migration capabilities. Similarly, Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation (ODF) provides Metro-DR and Regional-DR, though it often requires specific advanced entitlements and relies on a combination of OpenShift APIs for Data Protection (OADP) and underlying Ceph storage replication. NetApp is also heavily invested in this space, recently previewing its Disaster Recovery for Kubernetes solution integrated with Astra and Trident.

What sets Simplyblock apart is not necessarily the invention of these replication mechanics, but its aggressive bundling and architectural consolidation. Where incumbents often require a matrix of licenses—combining core storage capacity, advanced data management tiers, and specific multi-cluster management tools—Simplyblock is betting that a singular, fully integrated layer will outmaneuver the complex portfolios of its larger rivals. Industry analysts point out that this "all-in-one" strategy is particularly attractive to mid-market and enterprise organizations lacking the engineering bandwidth to stitch together disparate backup, recovery, and storage tools.

The Mechanics of Zero-RPO on Kubernetes

Executing zero-RPO synchronous replication in a stretched OpenShift cluster requires overcoming severe latency constraints. Traditional storage architectures often buckle under the I/O demands of continuous data replication, introducing intolerable latency overhead that degrades application performance.

Simplyblock circumvents these bottlenecks by operating at the bleeding edge of storage networking. The platform leverages NVMe over TCP and NVMe over RDMA (NVMe-oF), combined with Storage Performance Development Kit (SPDK) acceleration. By utilizing SPDK, Simplyblock bypasses the Linux kernel entirely, enabling user-space storage applications to execute extremely low-latency I/O operations. This architecture allows the platform to sustain the high throughput required for distributed erasure coding across metro distances—typically under 10 milliseconds of round-trip time—without choking the primary workloads.

Furthermore, the inclusion of backup and restore capabilities to any external S3-compatible object storage provides an essential air-gapped recovery option. This ensures that even in the event of a catastrophic multi-cluster compromise, organizations maintain an independent data lifecycle management strategy. By grounding these advanced capabilities in high-performance, non-proprietary protocols, Simplyblock is providing the resilient foundation required for the next generation of enterprise virtualization.