PNC’s infrastructure modernization journey with Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization

For Marcus Dobeck, vice president and head of container orchestration at The PNC Financial Services Group, if the challenge of 2025 could be summarized in a single word it would be demand. 

Like many organizations, PNC was moving from a place where they were used to managing a handful of clusters to a reality where they faced hundreds of new requests. In the past, an 8-week delivery window was acceptable, but as the bank’s digital needs expanded, delivery times needed to shrink. 

We sat down with Dobeck to discuss why PNC made the decision to move to Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization and what impact that migration has had. 

Moving beyond the legacy hypervisor

Dobeck compares the shift from their previous hypervisor to Red Hat OpenShift to the transition from a fragmented mobile ecosystem to a streamlined one. 

“The previous solution was trying to do everything for everyone,” Dobeck explained. That “do it all” complexity created a heavy administrative burden. To move faster, the team needed a platform where virtual machines (VMs) were treated as a critical priority alongside containers. 

By adopting OpenShift Virtualization, the team moved to a standardized “one VM type” model. Whether the workload is a database or a specialized application, it lives on a single, unified template within the OpenShift ecosystem. According to Dobeck, this standardization allowed them to cut delivery times from, “8 weeks down to 4 with a target of 5 to 10 days in 2026.”

The bare-metal advantage

For PNC, the move wasn’t just about software, it was about collapsing the distance between the application and the hardware. By running OpenShift Virtualization on bare metal, OpenShift itself acts as the fleet manager. This allows VMs to run with near-native performance, which was a game-changer for PNC’s resource-heavy databases.

This shift also changed the team’s internal dynamics. In the legacy model, a SKU was ordered and handed off to a siloed hyperconverged team. Now that work is directly handed to the bare metal compute team, eliminating the need for a dedicated separate storage array.

Managing a fleet, not a cluster

When you are managing 200 clusters, you can no longer afford to treat them individually. You need a way to manage the entire estate as a single entity. 

One key to their success was Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes.  

Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management serves as the central command center for PNC. It allows Dobeck’s team to define security policies and guardrails centrally and push them out across hundreds of clusters simultaneously. It isn’t just for the orchestration team, either, it provides a single point of entry for the observability team and other integrators who need to monitor the health of the bank’s infrastructure without the friction of accessing clusters individually. 

A bridge to modernization 

Another advantage of OpenShift is that it provides organizations with a clear pathway to modernization. In a large financial institution, legacy core banking applications often cannot be containerized immediately. 

With OpenShift and OpenShift Virtualization, PNC is able to run their critical VMs right next to modern, containerized microservices on the same platform. They share the same networking, the same storage protocols, and the same security policies. This unified approach has allowed Dobeck’s team to move away from “monolith” clusters toward smaller, purpose-built clusters that are easier to update and scale. 

“We couldn’t have made our deadlines without Red Hat’s help and modern tooling,” Dobeck says.

A lesson in planning

While PNC has seen immediate improvements from using OpenShift Virtualization, Dobeck is clear that this wasn’t just a simple “plug and play” migration. PNC initially viewed this as a “rip and replace” project, realizing that integrating storage and networking at the scale they needed required collaboration across their storage and networking teams. 

Dobeck said that he would absolutely recommend the shift to OpenShift Virtualization, “while understanding that the work will shift from your hypervisor team to your own team up front. You have to plan for that.” 

 

By leaning into their collaboration with Red Hat, PNC was able to successfully implement OpenShift Virtualization and turn it into a competitive advantage. PNC isn’t just managing VMs anymore, they’ve built a self-service platform that allows the bank to move at the speed of modern code. 

Watch the video below to hear from Dobeck about the shift to Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization.