Advent One modernizes IT with Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization

As a hybrid cloud solutions and managed services provider, Advent One often maximizes service quality for its clients by validating new technologies through internal deployment first. When making a shift from virtual machines to containers, the company coded a unified platform to deploy and manage both. Advent One works with a range of leading technologies including Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and its Event-Driven Ansible feature. The unified platform features Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization at its core. These solutions automate provisioning, patching, security, and IT management tasks, resulting in business resilience, lower resource consumption, and for Advent One, time savings of more than a week every month. Having realized the benefits of automation within its own business, Advent One now delivers high-quality assets, intellectual property (IP) and expertise to its clients.

Benefits

• Saved a week’s work every 30 days with automation
• Strengthened resilience through integration and automation
• Reduced the number of required VMs by up to 50% with a container-based approach

Headquartered in Australia, Advent One helps midmarket and enterprise clients safeguard their IT environments through managed services, cloud solutions, and technology integration. Advent One’s clients are increasingly asking the company to assist with IT modernization efforts, most of which focus on simplifying hybrid platform management through automation, containerization, observability, and optimization.

To maximize service quality for its clients, Advent One hones its skills in emerging technologies by implementing them for internal consumption first. This approach allows Advent One to validate solutions in real-world scenarios and build tested, repeatable delivery models. “We adopt new technologies internally first so we can build a proven blueprint for our customers,” said Talor Holloway, CTO at Advent One. “This means our solutions and services are based on real-world experience and continuous improvement.”

Given the scale of the client environments it is responsible for managing, Advent One prioritized the adoption of automation. The company recognized that automating manual IT management processes could reduce operational overheads, increasing efficiency for Advent One and controlling costs for its clients.

The company was also keen to modernize its infrastructure by shifting from virtual machines (VMs) to a containerized environment. This move not only increased agility and simplified deployment, but also controlled costs in response to rising virtualization platform expenses.

Initially, Advent One deployed Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to automate provisioning and configuration across its public cloud environments. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is a trusted, versatile solution for turning automation into strategic advantage. The company then extended its use to on-premise systems, creating a unified automation approach to managing VMs across hybrid environments.

To further increase operational efficiency, Advent One has adopted the Ansible Automation Platform Event-Driven Ansible feature, using event-driven automation to reduce manual tasks and deliver more efficient workflows. This capability is powered by integrating Ansible Automation Platform with an observability solution. Advent One monitors infrastructure to identify potential problems, which triggers automated remediation activities in Event-Driven Ansible.

“Our team identifies high-frequency incidents, such as disk errors, stopped services, or reporting requests, and automates responses to them with Event-Driven Ansible,” said Holloway. “This ensures a rapid resolution for our clients and frees up the team allowing them to focus on identifying opportunities to further optimize our customer environments.”

Advent One has also taken a strategic approach to modernizing its infrastructure by consolidating and containerizing its applications with Red Hat OpenShift, a trusted and consistent platform for developing, modernizing, and deploying applications at scale. The company uses Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization to deploy and manage VMs on the same platform, simplifying day-to-day management.

Advent One was the first Red Hat Partner in Asia Pacific to join the Specialized Partner Program because the company implemented Red Hat OpenShift using its own certified engineers and administrators. During Advent One’s transition from its existing virtualization platform to Red Hat OpenShift, it was able to switch modules using Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to continue to manage its VMs in the same way, without disrupting workflows.

Today, around 90% of Advent One’s workloads run on Red Hat OpenShift, with roughly half containerized and the rest managed through Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization. Advent One has containerized internal systems, such as managed services dashboards, monitoring tools, and important IT infrastructure like Active Directory and domain controllers. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform also runs as a containerized application within Red Hat OpenShift.

To support repeatability and consistency across environments, Advent One uses Red Hat OpenShift GitOps, a feature of Red Hat OpenShift built on Argo CD, to automate deployments and manage cluster configurations. “Red Hat OpenShift gives us the tools we need in 1 platform, with the ability to manage containers, virtualization, GitOps workflows, and automation,” said Holloway.

Saved a week’s work every 30 days with automation

Using Event-Driven Ansible and Red Hat OpenShift, automation has reduced the time Advent One’s teams spend on repetitive tasks. “Our dashboards show that over 30 days, event-driven automation alone has saved a week’s worth of effort,” said Holloway. “Our teams can now focus on what matters —solving productivity impacting problems, helping our customers modernize their environments, and delivering more proactive and innovative managed services.”

These efficiencies not only benefit internal operations, but also clients. Advent One can resolve complex issues faster, meet service-level agreements more consistently, and offer highly repeatable, proven processes. With first-hand experience in modern platforms like Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, Advent One is well positioned to guide clients through their own modernization journeys.

Strengthened resilience through integration and automation

Using Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to automate patching, Advent One has significantly decreased the time and effort in applying security patches. “We have reduced patching times from 2 hours to just 20 minutes, as with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform containerized in Red Hat OpenShift, we can run more jobs in parallel,” said Holloway.

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform also automates system hardening, which helps Advent One maintain resilience and compliance. The company uses Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and Red Hat OpenShift Compliance Operator to help enforce standards like the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) Essential 8, Center for Internet Security (CIS) baselines, and the ISO/IEC 27000 framework.

Advent One has also integrated Red Hat OpenShift with enterprise-grade backup and disaster-recovery solutions, including Veeam Kasten and NetApp Trident, which has brought recovery time objectives down from 1 hour to 5 minutes, and recovery point objectives from 4 hours to just 5 minutes.

Reduced the number of VMs required by up to 50% with a container-based approach

By adopting a container-based approach, Advent One has reduced the number of VMs by up to 50% and is now down to below 100. This reduction has decreased its compute, storage, and resource requirements. The shift to containerized workloads has also allowed Advent One to bring select services back on premise from the cloud, where it made financial and operational sense.

In one example, Advent One reduced the memory consumption of its internal customer dashboards from 184GB to just 10GB by moving them to containers. “We’ve significantly reduced our VM count and compute usage, which cuts costs and makes our environment easier to manage,” said Holloway.

Advent One’s modernization program, and continued work with its customers to implement the unified virtual machine and container platform, resulted in the company winning Partner of the Year in the Ecosystem Awards 2025 for Australia and New Zealand.

“Now we have successfully completed our own automation and containerization projects, we are increasingly working with customers to do the same,” said Holloway.

The company has not paused its internal innovations either. Advent One is currently planning to integrate Event-Driven Ansible to improve its Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices. “By building in AI augmentation, we will be able to address new use cases with higher-quality solutions,” said Holloway. “With our Red Hat partnership, we have access to platforms and tools we can use to continually innovate and deliver improvements internally and for our clients.”