# SimplyBlock provides simpler OpenShift disaster recovery > Source: > Published: 2026-09-29 07:00:00+00:00 # SimplyBlock provides simpler OpenShift disaster recovery Containerized block storage supplier [SimplyBlock](https://www.blocksandfiles.com/block/2024/02/16/simplyblock-heads-towards-ai-powered-storage-tiering-from-fast-aws-block-storage-base/1598395) is shipping business continuity and disaster recovery functions for Red Hat OpenShift deployments to help with VMware-to-OpenShift migrations. OpenShift is Red Hat’s framework to build, deploy, run, and manage containerized apps—and increasingly VMs and AI workloads—across on-premises data centers, public clouds, and the edge. SimplyBlock was started up in Berlin, Germany in 2022 to provide ultra-fast block storage with NVMe SSDs on premises or ephemeral block storage in the public cloud. The first release product provided millions of IOPS with sub-millisecond latency for apps using AWS’ Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). SimplyBlock’s proprietary VASH (Virtual Autonomous Storage Hyperscaler) technology [storage engine](https://blocksandfiles.com/2022/05/06/storage-engine/) balanced and optimized provisioned volumes across the storage cluster. It raised $2.75 million seed funding in February 2024. By February 2026 its self-hosted, serverless PostgreSQL Vela software provided instant Postgres database branches with no data copying. Dragon Slayer Consulting CEO Marc Staimer said: “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. CSI shared storage lacks the granularity, business continuity, and low-cost users are looking for. Simplyblock is the first to solve this problem.” Simplyblock says VMware customers have traditionally relied on vSAN, vMotion, Storage vMotion, and Site Recovery Manager for replication, failover, recovery and workload mobility. As enterprises transition VMware workloads to Kubernetes-based virtualization, these integrated storage-level business continuity and DR capabilities have not been a standard part of the underlying storage platform. It points out that storage-level DR for OpenShift has typically required premium storage add-ons licensed separately on every worker node at both the primary and the recovery site, often making it the single most expensive component of the platform stack. Rob Pankow, SimplyBlock’s CEO said: “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.” With its new software, SimplyBlock has multiple ways to protect VM workloads across clusters and sites much more economically. It operates at the storage layer, providing the data replication and protection foundation on which broader cluster-level disaster recovery workflows can be built: - **Synchronous (metro) replication across sites** through distributed erasure coding in a stretch-cluster configuration, providing zero-RPO business continuity when workloads require continuous data availability across sites. - **Asynchronous replication with** continuously replicated volumes between clusters, using delta-based replication, automated fail-back and active monitoring of replication backlog and application-consistent recovery across related volumes and workloads. Recovery point objectives can be as low as 1 minute. - **Live forward replication of volumes across clusters:** Running volumes can be moved between clusters without disruption, providing vMotion–like workload mobility for maintenance, hardware refreshes, planned infrastructure changes and cluster relocation. - **Backup and restore through external S3 storage:** Customers can protect data off site by backing up to any S3-compatible object store. Learn more [here](https://simplyblock.io/use-cases/simplyblock-disaster-recovery/). ##### Bootnote Other storage vendors also provide OpenShift disaster recovery; 1. Arctera's InfoScale for Kubernetes is certified for OpenShift Virtualization; replication/HA on supported backends 2. Everpure Portworx Enterprise provides Sync and async DR for containers and OpenShift Virtualization VMs; also Portworx Backup. 3. Hitachi Vantara's VSP + CSI + Replication Plug-in for Containers features TrueCopy (sync) and Universal Replicator (async) between clusters. 4. IBM Storage Fusion, Fusion Data Foundation, FlashSystem / Storage Virtualize CSI offers HA replication, Fusion backup/DR, Ceph-style Metro/Regional patterns with IBM Storage Ceph. 5. NetApp ONTAP + Trident + Trident Protect / AppMirror delivers SnapMirror-style replication, snapshots, and backup to ONTAP S3 or StorageGRID. 6. Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation (ODF), backed by Red Hat Ceph Storage, is the official storage DR stack with: - Metro-DR — synchronous replication, near-zero RPO, short distance - Regional-DR — asynchronous replication across regions - Stretch cluster — one ODF cluster across two sites plus an arbiter - RHACM orchestrator.