Red Hat Summit 2026 | Greg Muscarella, Portworx by Everpure, & Michael Cardaci, FedHIVE.com

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More from Red Hat Summit 2026

Greg Muscarella

GM

Portworx

Michael Cardaci

CEO

FedHIVE.com

play_circle_outline Red Hat Summit 2026: Partnerships Powering Cloud Modernization — FedHIVE, a 30-Year DoD MSP with ATO/FedRAMP Sponsorship

play_circle_outline Portworx: Cloud-Neutral Unified Data Platform for Containers and VMs Enabling Hybrid/Multi-Cloud Flexibility and Vendor Choice

play_circle_outline Data portability between private cloud and hyperscalers with flexible backup options

play_circle_outline Compliance-First Self-Service: Automating NIST, DISA, FIPS, TLS and Zero-Trust to Improve Customer Experience and Cut Operational Labor

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Greg Muscarella, Portworx by Everpure, & Michael Cardaci, FedHIVE.com

Greg Muscarella

GM Portworx

Michael Cardaci

CEO FedHIVE.com

In this interview from Red Hat Summit 2026 in Atlanta, Greg Muscarella, general manager of Portworx by Pure Storage, joins Michael Cardaci, chief executive officer of FedHIVE, to talk with theCUBE's Rob Strechay and Rebecca Knight about how a compliance-first modernization strategy is accelerating the migration from legacy virtualization to cloud-native infrastructure. Cardaci describes FedHIVE's evolution from a 30-year-old managed services provider into a compliance-as-a-service platform helping government and commercial organizations navigate FedRAMP autho... Read more

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What is FedHIVE, and what is the organization's purpose/mission? add

What are customers looking for when transitioning to containers and hybrid cloud environments, especially regarding unified operations and storage solutions? add

How did you address data portability and integrate different storage systems (including backups to hyperscalers) as part of your re‑architecture and modernization with Red Hat OpenShift and Portworx? add

How did adopting Portworx and OpenShift enable your organization to modularize deployments, manage data sovereignty across DoD/federal/commercial/SLED/education environments, reduce operational labor and costs (e.g., ~30%), enable self‑provisioning, and improve customer experience and ROI? add

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Greg Muscarella, Portworx by Everpure, & Michael Cardaci, FedHIVE.com

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Rob Strechay

>> Hello, and welcome back to beautiful Atlanta. We're here at Red Hat Summit 2026, having a great time, and continuing down the path of understanding how partnerships really bring and enable new services for organizations. I'm Rob Strechay. I'm really happy to be here because I get to dive in deep now with Greg Muscarella, who's the GM of Portworx by Everpure. Welcome on board, Greg.

Greg Muscarella

>> Thanks, Rob.

Rob Strechay

>> And then I have Michael... I almost got it. Cardaci. Cardaci.

Michael Cardaci

>> Cardaci.

Rob Strechay

>> Cardaci.

Michael Cardaci

>> Very close.

Rob Strechay

>> I thought I'd get it right, but me in my head. Who's the CEO of FedHIVE. Welcome on board, both of you.

Michael Cardaci

>> Thank you.

Rob Strechay

>> Mike, why don't you kind of help us understand who FedHIVE is, and what your goal is and purpose?

Michael Cardaci

>> Sure. So we've been around for about 30 years. We started out as an MSP and then a app dev company, got involved with DoD, had to do data analysis. And then as we're going through that, we went through all of these different word salads, as you've said. DIACAP and DITSCAP, and now we're in the FedRAMP realm and the SRG, and all that sort of thing. So we did those compliance things for ourselves. And then what we found was other folks were having a tough time. So we have been helping non-federal agencies get industry into their organizations. ATOs, authority to operate, very difficult for folks to do. We helping them get through that. We act as that for the sponsor and for the authorization. So that's our main goal right now.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah. And so people understand, when you want to go and become FedRAMP or one of the even higher ones, you have to have a agency plus a provider to help you get through that process because there's a lot that goes into that.

Michael Cardaci

>> That's right. That's exactly right. It's usually a two year process.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah. And I would assume by coming to somebody like yourselves, they help to shorten that process and bring new innovative tech to government.

Michael Cardaci

>> Yep. Yes. So our job is to lower the cost, lower the time, and also the re-engineering. So we've got platforms, as we're here talking about today, that help to make that go faster and smoother.

Rob Strechay

>> So let's kind of roll back a little bit because there's been these moments in time. And one of them, a lot of people have been leaning in and trying to figure out how do they modernize their environment? How do they really move beyond what had been their virtualization before. And not only that, but help to manage this in a controlled way with containers and VMs, and be able to move forward into these new architectures. What was kind of the catalyst for FedHIVE going with Portworx, and really moving in this direction?

Michael Cardaci

>> Yeah. So we went and we evaluated multiple platforms. We were coming up on end of life for some of our equipment. We were also looking at the new cost structure for some of the virtualization softwares. And so those were kind of prohibitive. So in this kind of journey, we have all these disparate networks, and we have to be able to look at legacy stuff with VMs, and then also manage more containerization as the old customers are starting to move into that and new customers are coming in and don't do VMs. So now how do we kind of have that hybrid? And then I didn't want to have multiple platforms that I had to manage. So how do I start to put all of that together? That was really the crux of it.

Rob Strechay

>> So Greg, kind of bring you into this conversation, Portworx, ability to move and kind of be that storage platform underneath various different workloads. Kind of talk to how that really helped FedHIVE and helping other organizations in this process.

Greg Muscarella

>> Well, FedHIVE and their customers I think are looking, well, similar things that we see, which is a large segment of the customer base is moving to containers. So that's the platform of the future, and there's an impetus to also move virtual machines now to that same platform if you can. But they want one seamless way of operating those things, not separate operating models. Storage is a little bit different between those two environments. So having some simple place to do that, I think is one of the big values. Beyond that, it's actually having different storage backends. So being able to use existing hardware that may exist in their infrastructure, or move to something new and more modern. They can do that as well. And again, a lot of them are operating in hybrid environments now too. So they have something on prem, they want to use that. But they also want to move to their favorite cloud provider, and they also don't want different operating models. Like you start getting a lot of permutations, and suddenly the operating team has difficulty keeping up with that. So that's a big chunk of what people are looking for, that continuous platform.

Michael Cardaci

>> And that feeds exactly into what one of our big issues were. We have a private cloud, but we also extend our boundary into all the hyperscalers. So we needed something that would be portable for our customers to be able to use it in the private cloud, but also either back it up in the private cloud or back it up to one of the other hyperscalers. And so having that connection and being able to have that data portability. And then also being able to connect to all these different storage aspects where we have different styles and different types of equipment and systems, and we're able to connect all of those together using the Portworx.

Rob Strechay

>> So kind of talk to how that really was part of this entire re-architecture and modernization with OpenShift. And Red Hat's OpenShift and OpenShift BERT, and where that process, and why you went down that way.

Michael Cardaci

>> Yeah. So as we were going through this, we were looking at, as any organization would, is that migration pain point. And so how do we have these legacy systems and have them working alongside with modern systems, and then being able to slowly port them over. And all of the tools with the whole OpenShift and Portworx platform allowed us to migrate really easily from the VMware to the OpenShift. So we were able to do it in pieces. We could look at those folks who wanted to move directly to Kubernetes. We were looking at those folks who wanted to have a hybrid. And then finally those who were just on the VM who didn't look like they were going to move. So we were able to do this in a piecemeal standpoint that didn't feel piecemeal because it was sections, and we could kind of modularize it. And that really helped for us to get ROI back.

Rob Strechay

>> And this also helps, I would assume, with the Portworx solution controlling at the data layer and then OpenShift kind of providing a lot of that, I guess you could say, sovereignty to help those. Because there's compartmentalization and other acronyms I'm sure we could go down, that DISA loves acronyms. But help people understand how that plays into it as well. The sovereignty and the data platform being, as Greg was talking about, being very, I guess you could say, very neutral between all of those other clouds that you're working with as well.

Michael Cardaci

>> Yeah. So having the ability to segment everything out into these different pieces, the DoD piece, the federal piece, the commercial piece or the SLED piece, state and local, sorry.

Rob Strechay

>> Yes. And education.

Michael Cardaci

>> And education. So having that to be able to manage that, because it's a very laborious management aspect, and then having the automation with the Portworx and being able to really cut down the labor costs, probably by about 30-ish percent, maybe more than that, for us to be able to manage that. And then add self-management, self-provisioning for our customers. So we're able to not only replicate the value that we had, but extend more value as we start to modernize. And so our customer experience is getting better and better. So that's, I think, really something that impacted us as we were moving forward and we were trying to look at what's kind of the next iteration that we want to get to. And having OpenShift and having Portworx and all of the technical support that we've had where they've been very responsive to get where we need to do, be able to do those things for our customer experience, has been real helpful.

Rob Strechay

>> And Greg, just building off of what Mike was talking about here, I would assume that a lot of the customers are leaning into this, how do I have a neutral platform for the data and the storage that works with OpenShift? And I think this was announced about two years ago that you were working with OpenShift on the container side in addition to the VM side and then support, I think, last year of OpenShift BERT. So you've got some history here. Do you see a lot of organizations that are looking to really have that, I guess you could say, cloud neutral stance when they're going through this?

Greg Muscarella

>> Absolutely. I mean, we're reminded of the need to be able to have choice amongst vendors, and to make sure that you're able to kind of dictate your own future. So that certainly lit a fire, as I mentioned, on this, this desire to get onto a platform, that flexibility to be both containers and virtualization, but also that freedom as well. And yeah, that's precisely what one of the key values of Portworx is, that we do let you use anything underneath it and mix and match. But it's not just that because that happens occasionally. It really is that operating model. So like we're saying, it's like day to day as I'm provisioning a new workload, how difficult or easy is that? As I want to set up DR for that, whether it be sync or async DR, like how can I do that? Is it different depending upon what my storage infrastructure looks like underneath it? And no, I mean DR is hard enough as it is. We'll need to add more permutations to that. Same thing for backup. Look, I just want this all to sort of work regardless of what's under there. So there's definitely impetus. And what we're seeing is actually kind of interesting. People always intended to go to containers. We're actually seeing, we've got a customer that has an ML pipeline currently running in virtual machines. So those virtual machines are coming over to OpenShift with Portworx underneath it. And the next step will then be to containerize those things piece by piece. But with it all being on one platform, it actually gives them an easier way to do that. So tremendous amount of interest, and we're seeing, yeah, it's funny, you're talking about the history there. It seems like two years is a long time, but it's also not very long, considering the seismic shift that's been going on here. And we have a lot of mutual customers that are emerging on the other side. I have a customer that's merged 99% of their very large automobile plants. 99% done. They're going to be done and dusted with their other licensing model at the end of this month for those plants. That's a long journey. Thousands and thousands of nodes and VMs. So people started a long time ago. We've come a long way. We see a lot more pipeline here as well.

Rob Strechay

>> Oh, I'm sure of that. There's no doubt of that. I mean, I think when you start to look at this, and that whole migration, compliance first had to be a mindset that you were looking at. Kind of help people understand. Because the word salad there, really, the acronym salad, not word salad, really there's reasons for that, and for those securities and compartmentalization and other things. Help people understand how you had to think compliance first as you were doing these migrations.

Michael Cardaci

>> Yeah. And our whole life has evolved into that compliance world. It's really compliance as a service, if you will, from that standpoint. So the ever changing footprint of attack vectors from the outside and what the government wants, NIST coming in with their rules, and saying, "Here are the changes you should do," and the government having them. And there's an ever evolution of all the different compliance requirements, and that's just in the US, and then you go international. So having to watch over those and have the encryptions in all of the fun stuff, the FIP stuff and all of those, making sure that you're TLS connected, and all of those cool, cool things to say, but making sure that every one of those is being addressed, that's what we need to do. So we went into this with that kind of expectation talking to the folks about, "Hey, this is where we're going." So we started out with that. So that was all the ground level before we even started the process.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah, I love that because I look at it. Let's kind of take it back to the outcomes and stuff. What have been some of the tangible outcomes that you've seen from this? And I mean you talked about the 30% and stuff, help people understand what that means.

Michael Cardaci

>> Yeah. So obviously equipment is expensive right now. So we want to use everything all the way to end of life. And we've got specific requirements for compliance with regard to that. But in the meantime, we're able to, with Portworx, we can use dissimilar systems and bringing things together. So as we're evolving and modernizing equipment, we're able then to connect that. So that's one of the things. We didn't have to throw a bunch of stuff out and start totally brand new. We could actually connect some of the legacy equipment that we had, legacy being a couple of years old, but be able to reuse that. And then looking at kind of this hierarchy of new stuff for AI pushing it there and having the old stuff for storage and some of the backend stuff. So that's been really good. That's probably cut quite a bit, maybe 25, 30% also from our capital expenditures going forward. And then the labor cost, you don't just have where your labor, hey, we saved 30%, it's not like you got rid of 30%. But they're able to do more. And that is, from an organization standpoint, that helps us push our company forward and that's future.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah. So Greg, kind of I like to say sweating the assets more. And how do you get more out of it and extend the life. Because we were talking, and when you look at it, five to 10 years out of some of these assets depending on what they are. What else have you seen, Greg, out of other customers and how they're seeing tangible outcomes from this as well?

Greg Muscarella

>> Well, building on what Mike shared there as well, I mean, it's not just getting more life out of your assets. They're hard to replace now. So lead times and the expense of new servers is ridiculous. So if you do want to move to something different, you almost have to reuse at least a chunk of what you want while you might be able to start to add in new assets. So new servers, new storage backends, whatever it might be. So that's one piece of it. The outcomes really come down to, I want to get onto new modern platforms. So we see all advantages of containerization, which we've talked about a lot. So it's tighter bin packing, it's higher availability, it's more productivity. It's ability to have your workloads float up and down. It's the portability of your applications and your workloads across clouds and things like this.

Michael Cardaci

>> New set of customers.

Greg Muscarella

>> New set of customers. So even if you don't have intention right now of like I'm not doing hybrid cloud, but the ability to do things, or I'm not mixing containers and virtual machines, but you have the ability to. So some of this future proofing. Because things happen as we're seeing. So server prices go amazingly expensive. How are you going to react to that? Power price is going amazingly expensive. So those are some of the big outcomes. On the AI side as well, that's adding new stress. So we had the containerized workloads coming on as people were refactoring those. There's this big influx of virtualized workloads. And at the same time, we're seeing a lot of AI workloads as well. Those tend to be natively containered. So that's why you have this, again, desire for a single platform that can work across all those different pieces.

Rob Strechay

>> And how is AI helping, I guess you could say? Because AI assisted is one of the big things right now, especially around security and being able to make sure that you're being proactive. And one of the things is AI doesn't sleep. So how is AI factoring into all of this as well in that threat landscape?

Michael Cardaci

>> Well, I'll take a step back with our customers before the AI threat aspect of it. But the government, we're focused mostly on government, so government wants innovation. Innovation, there's a lot of AI in the innovation aspect. And for that innovation, those creative folks who are bringing that differentiation need the breadth of environments to be able to do what they need to do however they need to do that. So we're trying to give them as green a field as possible for them to be able to build their innovation, their creativity. And I think most of them are AI driven, or at least partially driven with AI. So having that capability is really what's been driving some of our momentum.

Rob Strechay

>> And I would assume zero trust and all of that factors in as well.

Michael Cardaci

>> Absolutely. So all of those different components as they come to bear, again, talking about the compliance aspect of it ever changing. And zero trust is a thing, and it's getting more and more impactful. All of the other aspects of AI, and more criticism of AI, and how do we show more into the AI, and how do we do more with containers? How do we replicate it? How do we have availability? Everything is high availability now and geo separated, et cetera, et cetera. So this allows for that way, way more easier.

Greg Muscarella

>> So something even more banal around the AI piece is just more. So you mentioned AI doesn't sleep. So as you get agents that are working, imagine if you had a whole bunch of employees that, not only didn't sleep, but we're very fast typists, or we're accessing your API a lot. So you might think like AI is something other companies are doing, or it's not something we're using in house yet, which different paces of adoption. But you see those workloads just start to come up. I mean, a good example is just GitHub. So if you look at the number of PRs, the number of check-ins, the number of new projects, and they're struggling with the availability of their platform. The platform hasn't changed. Even if you said like, I'm not using Copilot or any of that sort of stuff, well, of course you are, but just keeping up with that increased workload is tremendous. And so every enterprise is going to see the same thing. As your accountants or your finance team or your developers start to take advantage of AI, that's going to put stress on your CI/CD pipeline. All of a sudden you're running a lot more tests continuously. So even if you don't think about all the magic and all the other stuff in there, just double, triple your workload, can you handle that? How do you get the most efficiency out of your environment?

Rob Strechay

>> I appreciate it because I think this has been really great talking about how Red Hat OpenShift is really helping you modernize and how Portworx has really become that kind of, I guess you could say, that control and data layer for the workloads as you help to sweat your assets even more. So I really appreciate you both coming on board.

Michael Cardaci

>> Absolutely. It's been great.

Greg Muscarella

>> Appreciate the conversation, Rob. Thank you.

Rob Strechay

>> Thank you. And thank you for watching this episode live from Red Hat Summit 2026 from Atlanta. We'll be back with more in just a little bit on theCUBE, the leader in tech analysis and news. Stay tuned.