How CSX is Moving Rail Infrastructure from VMs to Kubernetes

CSX, one of North America’s most critical rail operators, made the move to run its VMs on Kubernetes without compromising the resilience required to keep trains running safely. By partnering with Red Hat and Portworx, CSX migrated their VMs to Kubernetes with a platform that spans cloud and on-premises environments and lays the groundwork for a container-first future across 400+ applications.

The Challenge

CSX operates some of the most critical infrastructure in North America, including Tier 0 systems like Positive Train Control (PTC) and rail dispatch, where failure is simply not an option. When shifts in the virtualization landscape threatened to lock the organization into a single vendor, the team looked for alternatives.

They chose to leverage their existing OpenShift infrastructure by moving their VMs off VMware and onto Kubernetes. But they needed a highly resilient, performant storage solution that could run seamlessly across a hybrid environment.

Business Transformation

In partnership with Red Hat and Portworx, CSX built a platform for running VMs on Kubernetes across their on-premises and cloud environments. Since their team already had OpenShift expertise, CSX could keep operations lean with a single, unified platform.

The team validated the new stack through a rigorous proof of concept before committing to production. They had to quickly build a VM from scratch, migrate existing VMs from VMware to OpenShift Virtualization, and live migrate VMs from host to host. To find the right storage layer, CSX ran benchmarks against ODF, local disk, NetApp, and Portworx. Portworx came out on top for both resilience and speed. Now, their new, modern platform helps pave a clear path to eventually move even their most critical Tier 0 workloads (PTC and train dispatch) from VMs to containers.