SimplyBlock is shipping business continuity and disaster recovery functions for Red Hat OpenShift deployments, aiming squarely at enterprises migrating VMware workloads to Kubernetes-based virtualization who no longer want to pay for a separately licensed DR layer on every worker node.

The Berlin-based containerized block storage supplier, founded in 2022, argues that storage-level DR for OpenShift has typically required premium add-ons licensed on every worker node at both the primary and recovery site — often the single most expensive component of the platform stack. Its answer: replication, recovery and off-site protection built directly into the storage platform.

"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," said Rob Pankow, SimplyBlock's CEO.

The technology underneath

SimplyBlock built its business on ultra-fast NVMe block storage, either on premises or as ephemeral block storage in the public cloud. Its first release delivered millions of IOPS with sub-millisecond latency for applications running on AWS' Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), with the company's proprietary VASH (Virtual Autonomous Storage Hyperscaler) storage engine balancing and optimizing provisioned volumes across the cluster. The company raised $2.75 million in seed funding in February 2024; by February 2026 it had shipped Vela, a self-hosted, serverless PostgreSQL platform providing instant database branches without data copying.

The new DR software operates at the storage layer, providing the data replication and protection foundation on which broader cluster-level disaster recovery workflows can be built. It ships with four protection mechanisms:

• Synchronous (metro) replication across sites via distributed erasure coding in a stretch-cluster configuration, delivering zero-RPO business continuity for workloads that need continuous data availability across sites.
• Asynchronous replication with continuously replicated volumes between clusters, using delta-based replication, automated fail-back, 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 move between clusters without disruption, providing vMotion-like workload mobility for maintenance, hardware refreshes, planned infrastructure changes and cluster relocation.
• Backup and restore to external S3 storage, letting customers protect data off site on any S3-compatible object store.

The migration gap

The company's core argument is that VMware customers have long relied on vSAN, vMotion, Storage vMotion and Site Recovery Manager for replication, failover, recovery and workload mobility. As those workloads move to Kubernetes-based virtualization, equivalent storage-level business continuity and DR capabilities have not been a standard part of the underlying storage platform.

Marc Staimer, CEO of Dragon Slayer Consulting, framed the market gap bluntly: "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."

A crowded field

SimplyBlock is not alone in targeting OpenShift DR. Arctera's InfoScale for Kubernetes is certified for OpenShift Virtualization, offering replication and high availability on supported backends. Dell-adjacent and hyperscaler rivals span the spectrum: Portworx Enterprise provides sync and async DR for containers and OpenShift Virtualization VMs plus Portworx Backup; Hitachi Vantara pairs its VSP arrays with a CSI replication plug-in for containers, running TrueCopy synchronous and Universal Replicator asynchronous replication between clusters.

IBM counters with Storage Fusion, Fusion Data Foundation, and FlashSystem/Storage Virtualize CSI, offering HA replication, Fusion backup/DR, and Ceph-style metro and regional patterns through IBM Storage Ceph. NetApp's ONTAP plus Trident and Trident Protect/AppMirror delivers SnapMirror-style replication, snapshots and backup to ONTAP S3 or StorageGRID.

The incumbent benchmark is Red Hat's own OpenShift Data Foundation, backed by Red Hat Ceph Storage: Metro-DR for synchronous, near-zero-RPO replication over short distances; Regional-DR for asynchronous cross-region replication; a stretch-cluster mode spanning two sites plus an arbiter; and RHACM as the orchestrator.

SimplyBlock's differentiation is therefore not the existence of DR capabilities but the pricing and packaging model — integrated protection without per-node DR licensing at both sites, which the startup says has made disaster recovery the costliest line item in many OpenShift platform stacks. Whether integrated storage-level DR at startup pricing can displace established stacks from IBM, NetApp and Red Hat itself will decide how much of the VMware-to-OpenShift migration wave the Berlin company can capture.