Author: Admin Clear

Newly Released Assure MIMIX 10 Provides 4 Key Benefits for Organizations with IBM i

Posted on by Admin Clear

 

Precisely recently launched the latest IBM i HA and DR product, Assure MIMIX 10. In a press release, Precisely highlighted new capabilities including the ability to expedite data recovery by replicating data to production servers in near real-time – resulting in better protection for businesses from the high costs associated with downtime.

Clear Technologies specializes in helping clients run Assure MIMIX 10 for IBM i systems. With a wide range of services including implementation, health checks, MIMIX audits, role-swap services, and more, Clear Technologies is recognized by Precisely as a leading solution provider for Assure MIMIX 10.

SPEAK WITH OUR ASSURE MIMIX 10 EXPERT!

Assure MIMIX 10 provides 4 valuable benefits for businesses with IBM i:

  • Helps eliminate downtime with flexible, scalable, and automated replication, and failover
  • Prevents data loss through maintaining real-time replicas of data to on-premise, hosted, or cloud environments
  • Automates administration of high availability and DR with simple interfaces
  • Provides workload balancing and enhances IBM i mirroring solutions

Automation is key with the latest release of Assure MIMIX 10. With new automation capabilities, users can automate reliable configurations to run the product with minimal manual intervention.

“Clear Technologies, a leading solution provider of IT consulting, server, storage, and software products, welcomes these new updates: ‘Customers running Assure MIMIX on IBM i with a dynamic journal environment will greatly appreciate the automated journal-driven configuration support. Configuration is simplified, and dynamic changes to the journal environment are automatically handled, resulting in greater confidence in the replication environment,’ said Neil Clark, Technical Consultant at Clear Technologies.” – Precisely

“As a service provider for many customers running IBM i high availability solutions, the automated journal-driven configuration support in Assure MIMIX 10 will really help make our job easier,” said Neil Clark, Technical Consultant at Clear Technologies.

 

REQUEST AN ASSURE MIMIX IBM i HEALTH CHECK!

Clear Technologies’ team of IBM Champions works with clients to ensure Power systems running IBM i are fully prepared for disaster recovery. With our Assure MIMIX IBM i Health Check, you will gain critical insight into the performance, replication, and recovery abilities of your IBM i system.

Ensure your Power system running IBM i is fully prepared for disaster recovery, speak with an Assure MIMIX specialist today!

CLEAR TECHNOLOGIES | 2021 Finalist – IT Systems Reseller/Managed Service Provider

Posted on by Admin Clear

We’re Finalists! 

Clear Technologies is proud to be recognized as a finalist for the top IT Systems Reseller/Managed Service Provider of The Year Award by SDC!

The SDC 2021 Awards celebrate the high achievements of end-users and solution providers in the IT industry. Nominees and finalists are recognized for successful achievements centered around digital transformation.

As an IT Systems Reseller/Managed Service Provider of The Year finalist, Clear Technologies is being recognized for our extensive experience delivering IT Solutions to our clients for over 25 years. Our solution experts specialize in a wide variety of platforms and vendors and work to create customized solutions to meet the client’s needs.

You can help us WIN IT Systems Reseller/Managed Service Provider of The Year.

Voting is now open! Click Here
Voting closes on November 17th.

Learn more about Clear Technologies’ IT Solutions HERE. 

CLEAR TECHNOLOGIES | Increase Your Power to Innovate with IT Modernization

Posted on by Admin Clear

In today’s fast-paced world of continuous change, IT decision-makers are being challenged to maintain existing IT systems and create a foundation for future innovation. The challenge to migrate legacy operations and adapt for the future while improving overall productivity and business performance proves difficult for many IT teams.

The goal of IT modernization is to get more out of your IT investments while freeing budget and time to prepare for the future. By shifting to modern software, platforms, and processes, you can accomplish faster delivery of software and services to meet internal and external demands. Modernization is an essential transition for success in the digital world.

Standardization

A complex IT environment requires additional time, resources, and budget to manage. Inconsistent processes impact the opportunity for growth and cause a need for reactive maintenance. Multiple platforms require increased training, support, and operational budget. By implementing a standardized operating environment (SOE) with Red Hat, you can achieve consistency across your organization. This allows IT teams to reduce costs and accelerate IT while supporting innovation.

New technologies including hybrid and private cloud connectivity, cloud-native development, and containers are supported on a modern solution. Standardization also provides enhanced security and compliance with policies and regulations. Centralizing the life-cycle management of your platform supports increased speed of installations, upgrades, and patching.

Digital Transformation

Digital transformation has many different meanings across IT environments. But one thing remains constant, all IT teams are facing the need to digitally transform their platforms, processes, and resources to maintain business continuity and adapt to evolving technology. By modernizing your IT environment, you can free up budget and resources for innovation in the age of digital transformation.

Lower your total cost of ownership and achieve a return on investment and deliver self-serving capabilities to IT users by automating processes with Red Hat Ansible Automation. Modern software not only improves IT efficiencies but also prepares you to adopt cloud-native and container-based development practices to help you become more agile. With an optimized hybrid cloud environment, you can increase flexibility and efficiency by replacing old infrastructure without downtime. 

Strategic Migration

Modernization is ongoing and requires IT decision-makers to continuously assess and migrate to new solutions with increased IT and business value. The adoption of a new technology platform poses obstacles concerning infrastructure, security, and deployment. Migrate what makes the most sense for your environment.

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform helps you develop, deploy, and manage existing and container-based applications seamlessly across physical, virtual, private, public and hybrid cloud infrastructures. With Red Hat OpenShift, you can increase operational efficiency, enforce security and compliance standards, and ensure uptime and availability.

Red Hat Consulting

As a premier partner in digital transformation, Clear Technologies offers the expertise needed to help manage your multi-site environment efficiently and securely. Whether you are looking to automate your IT processes with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform or accelerate application delivery with RedHat OpenShift, let Clear Technologies help modernize your IT environment.

Take the next step in modernizing your IT environment. Schedule time with a Red Hat consultant today.

 

Clear Technologies Announces Revolutionary New Service for Transforming Storage Optimization

Posted on by Admin Clear

 

Dallas, Texas – [September 21st, 2021] – Clear Technologies, a leading solution provider of IT consulting, server, storage, and software products, today announced the unveiling of a new service offering, Capacity Planning-as-a-Service, taking their storage expertise to the next level. In partnership with Visual One Intelligence®, the Capacity Planning-as-a-Service (CPaaS) solution is a significant advancement in the future of storage optimization.

Digital transformation heightens the need for continuous storage capacity analysis for determining critical IT infrastructure, application and financial resource needs. The CPaaS solution provides on-demand, comprehensive, actionable insight into the utilization and performance of any storage environment. CPaaS also eliminates the costly risk of over-provisioning cloud storage. With CPaaS, IT executives can ensure staff resources remain focused on normal workloads and suspend manual capacity planning. Paired with the human intelligence of Clear Technologies’ storage experts, IT executives will be well equipped to confidently make decisions for provisioning on-prem and cloud storage capabilities, at scale.

“We’re committed to building a strong, service-oriented relationship with our customers. In some of our discussions, we noticed customers conducting manual capacity planning outside of normal business operations and utilizing outdated tools. With turnover, the skillset and intricate excel spreadsheets were left to team members without the knowledge or time to complete manual reporting. We identified a strong need for accurate, on-demand capacity planning to help these customers save money and maintain normal workloads,” said Phil Godwin, Clear Technologies President and COO. “We’re excited to unveil the new Capacity Planning-as-a-Service offering to ensure customers are optimizing their storage environment and making confident, data-driven decisions for the future.”

Key Capacity Planning-as-a-Service Benefits:

  • Proactive Analysis – Actualize storage capacity needs on-demand with one centralized tool. Make confident, data-driven decisions in a timely manner.
  • Human Intelligence – Optimize storage capacity based on expert analysis and recommendations. With CPaaS, storage experts will factor in plans for acquisition, data migration or storage refresh.
  • Operational Equity – Build a risk-free IT Operations forecast by eliminating the financial pain of extended time and additional resources caused by manual capacity reporting.

“Developing the Capacity Planning-as-a-Service solution enhances the capabilities of the Visual One Intelligence® tool,” said Van Symons, Visual One Intelligence® Chief Technology Officer. “We created Visual One Intelligence® as a client-driven tool to continuously meet the needs of our clients’ storage environment. Capacity Planning is the future of storage optimization, and we are helping clients take a modern, proactive approach.”

About Clear Technologies

Clear Technologies partners with enterprise organizations to deliver customized IT solutions designed to increase operational efficiency. Unlike other solution providers, Clear Technologies utilizes Visual One Intelligence® (SRMaaS) to help enterprises discover performance insights, simplify storage management processes, and increase ROI. With over 25 years of experience and a premier offering of cloud-based infrastructure and services, combined with Visual One Intelligence®, Clear Technologies is the preferred partner in digital transformation.

Cybersecurity Resilience: Preemptive Protection for Your Storage Environment

Posted on by Admin Clear

Cybercrime continues to grow at an alarming rate. Companies have seen the highest average financial impact due to ransomware attacks in 2021, increasing from 3.86 million USD to 4.24 million USD.  Many companies are faced with the question of “When?” and not “If?” an attack will happen to them. Stop wasting time thinking about what could happen and focus on the reality of what to do when it happens. Is your cybersecurity resilience strategy airtight?

Protect your most valuable assets and mission-critical applications during the recovery of a cyberattack. Build a multi-level strategy to reduce downtime, save money and decrease human error.

Analyze Your Storage Environment
The first step in defining a cybersecurity resilience strategy is being able to recognize warning signs such as certain changes in your storage environment. Identify risk by utilizing Visual One Intelligence® (Visual One), a storage resource management service (SRMaaS). Visual One simplifies your storage management process by organizing independent data elements into a unified, visual analysis across your multi-vendor storage environment. With a single-pane-of glass-dashboard, you can view current and projected storage capacities. This level of insight helps detect unexpected activity – some of which can be a sign of security breaches.

Visual One Intelligence® – Risk Detection for Your Storage Environment 

Protect Your Data
With immutable copy, your data is encrypted as a read-only copy. If data cannot be changed, then it cannot be encrypted by ransomware. Attackers often target backups and snapshots first, limiting your recovery options. Once an attack happens, IT security teams need to work quickly to identify where it’s coming from to prevent the encryption of an entire network. Immutable copy reduces the impact of an attack because it is unaffected.

Clear Technologies – IT Security & Compliance Solutions

Maintain Business Continuity
Cybersecurity attacks will continue to evolve, and your storage environment must remain vigilant to maintain business continuity. Your storage infrastructure is regularly tested by utilizing IT Security and Compliance services from Clear Technologies to ensure confidence and compliance with the right resources.

The cost of ransomware and manpower is extreme. Cyber resiliency is priceless.

Be proactive about your company’s cybersecurity resiliency. Schedule time with one of our Security Experts.

Contact Us Today! 

CLEAR TECHNOLOGIES | Why Your Company Needs Cloud-Based Collaboration

Posted on by Admin Clear

During the pandemic, the collaboration tool video conferencing has turned into a pop culture phenomenon. Social media and TV advertisers use funny web conferencing mishaps to attract “likes” and customers and maybe even go viral.

The practical reality is that unified communications (UC) tools have enabled most organizations to make a successful switch to a remote workplace, whether employees are working in sweatpants and pajama bottoms or not.

An essential part of a successful business collaboration strategy is using a cloud-based collaboration platform. Cloud-based collaboration provides a way for companies to maximize and unify their business collaboration tools, making the most of their employees and better serving customers.

Optimizing the Remote Workplace

Collaboration tools are essential now that most companies have transitioned to remote workplaces. While working from home, employees want to recreate the interpersonal interactions they had in the office. UC grants immediacy of communication through instant messaging and video conferencing. These tools allow co-workers to exchange information face-to-face in real time.

Collaboration tools make it easier for project teams to work together no matter where the members are located. Project teams can use web conferencing to conduct brainstorming sessions and file sharing to ensure that team members have version control for documents related to the project.

UC helps employees serve customers and clients more effectively as well. VoIP helps customers and clients to reach the right person they need to answer questions and deliver personalized service.

Promoting Innovation Through Business Collaboration

Business collaboration has proven to be a great way to encourage employees to innovate. Giving employees access to key documents along with the ability to work with them gives them a sense of empowerment that encourages their participation and productivity.

During web conferences, employees feel their voices are being heard and their perspectives are being taken into account. Working together on projects through group chats can get the creative juices flowing and allows employees to contribute ideas and get immediate feedback from co-workers and supervisors.

Los Angeles Business Journal reported that texting or instant messaging is a collaborative tool that encourages productive conversations among co-workers, as well as between employees and supervisors, because of its brief format. Unlike longer communications, IMs and texts don’t shut employees down. Instead, IMs create a “culture of listening,” which encourages employees to participate and contribute.

Cloud-Based Collaboration – Why Collaborate in the Cloud?

Cloud-based collaboration enables companies to host and deliver their UC tools in and through the cloud. Cloud-based UC, otherwise known as UCaaS, makes it easier for companies to manage and maintain their phone systems, as well as other communications tools, such as video conferencing and instant messaging.

Hosting collaboration tools in the cloud allows anyone in the organization to access, work on, and edit documents in real time. Any changes can be viewed immediately, so if other team members are working on the document, they won’t be duplicating or missing changes or working with the wrong version.

When all the tools are hosted on a single platform in the cloud, they can be managed and maintained efficiently so your company and its employees derive the most value from them.

Cloud-Based Collaboration Tools

A wide variety of collaboration tools can be hosted in the cloud, including:

  • Unified Communications through Hosted Communications Services (HCS) such as network infrastructure and management, hosted PBX, conferencing and collaboration tools, hosted contact center, and workstream collaboration tools
  • Cloud PBX to access your phone services from anywhere you choose, migrate your existing phone numbers and users, and enable VoIP phones, desktop software, and cell phones to connect and receive VoIP calls
  • Integrated Voicemail, which ties your voicemail platform to your phone and your email, unifying all messaging in one platform
  • Centralized Faxing, which unifies the faxing process, delivering to an account structure you specify, including delivering faxes out to individual email addresses
  • Instant Messaging, which works alongside VoIP and voicemail access

Clear Technologies offers Cloud-based collaboration tools, such as Cisco Spark and Webex, which allow teams to work together as though they were in the same place even when they are separated. We can put together a suite of cloud-based collaboration tools that makes sense for your organization.

Take advantage of cloud-based collaboration at your business. Get started by requesting a cloud consultation with an expert from Clear Tech.

CLEAR TECHNOLOGIES | Key Advantages of Developing a Hybrid Cloud Strategy

Posted on by Admin Clear

For companies that want to modernize their operations and use data more efficiently and securely, hybrid cloud is a great option. However, for your organization to advance in its digital transformation journey, you need to do more than just adopt hybrid cloud. You must develop a hybrid cloud strategy.

Executive SAP Solution Architect Bob Gagnon emphasizes the importance of a hybrid cloud strategy, stating, “What strategy is emerging? Well, the hybrid strategy is gaining a great position: a strategy where a customer virtualizes on-premises for production workloads and leverages public cloud for other workloads. This strategy allows control of, and perimeter hardening of, the data.”

A hybrid cloud strategy will ensure that hybrid cloud resources align with your business goals and meet technology challenges. Developing a hybrid cloud strategy has many advantages, including increased flexibility, control, data protection, and data management.

Hybrid Cloud brings Flexibility and Agility

Hybrid cloud is valued for its flexibility because it provides both on-premises and public cloud resources. Virtualized on-site resources can be used for more sensitive data and production workloads, while public cloud resources can be used for customer-facing applications, archiving, and setting up development and testing environments. Both private and public cloud can be scaled up and down to meet changing capacity and workload demands.

A hybrid cloud strategy has the advantage of a unified platform that provides orchestration across private, public, and edge environments. Orchestration gives your company greater control over its cloud resources through single pane of glass management.

Data Protection & Disaster Recovery

Orchestration enhances hybrid cloud’s combination of on and off-premises resources by enabling efficient and reliable backup and disaster recovery functionality. On-site data can be synchronized with backups in the cloud for tighter recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs). Instant failover can be achieved in the public cloud for the purposes of disaster recovery.

When your company develops a hybrid cloud strategy that includes backup and disaster recovery, you can rest assured that your mission-critical and personally identifiable customer data will be safe from loss or compromise. Being strategic about where your data is stored in the hybrid cloud will strengthen your data protection efforts, as will using encryption.

Data Management & Hybrid Cloud Strategy

Companies can make data management part of their hybrid cloud strategy by using private and public cloud to tier data storage. Public cloud resources are ideal for storing less sensitive and frequently accessed data or for archiving data for the purposes of compliance audits. Private cloud provides the right environment for storing sensitive data, which requires strict access controls.

Data management is the key to organizing data so value can be extracted from it, meaning that data management should be part of any hybrid cloud strategy. Automating data management processes will ensure that data is moved to the correct type of storage so it can be accessed for use in advanced analytics, which produce the insights needed for optimal decision making.

How to Develop a Hybrid Cloud Strategy

When designing a hybrid cloud strategy, your company doesn’t need to go it alone. Finding the right technology partner will help you navigate those next steps in your cloud journey. Working with a cloud provider that is platform agnostic will ensure you find the ideal public cloud option to complement your private cloud resources.

Clear Technologies partners with leading cloud solutions IBM Cloud, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft Azure to deliver flexibility and scalability to our clients. We also offer Clear Managed Services to help you optimize your hybrid cloud resources without monopolizing your IT staff, as well as connectivity solutions to support your cloud assets. Our cloud experts will help your company get the most value out of your cloud investment.

Get on the road to a winning hybrid cloud strategy. Request a cloud consultation from Clear Tech.

CLEAR TECHNOLOGIES | How to Choose the Right Cloud Model

Posted on by Admin Clear

The number of cloud models that are available is increasing. Today’s companies can choose between hybrid and multicloud models in addition to public and private cloud. More choices can add to the difficulty of selecting the right cloud model for your company.

According to the 2021 State of the Cloud Report, hybrid cloud continues to dominate the market, with 78% of respondents indicating that they use it, while only 19% use public cloud exclusively and a mere 2% use only private cloud. Preferences for certain cloud models fluctuate, but a rise in the popularity of one model doesn’t mean it’s the best one for your business.

The cloud model your company chooses should align with company goals and the requirements of your workloads. Here’s an overview of the main cloud models and their common use cases.

Private Cloud: Great Control Over Security & Access

On its own, private cloud may not be the most popular cloud model, but it does have its uses, particularly when combined with public cloud in a hybrid cloud model. Private cloud is right for storing sensitive and mission-critical data because it provides the greatest control over IT security and access.

Essentially, private cloud is made up of virtualized resources that are hosted on-premises or at a colocation and that meet the unique needs of your organization. Private cloud is ideal for companies in industries that must follow strict compliance regulations governing access to data. Because private cloud is hosted on-premises, it also reduces the latency users might experience trying to access and run applications in the public cloud.

Public Cloud: Scalability, Archiving, & DevOps

Unlike private cloud, public cloud is a multi-tenant environment. A number of organizations may share resources, which are available on the internet, and use them for storage and running applications.

Public cloud is ideal for customer-facing applications, archiving data, and creating application dev/test environments. These use cases involve data and workloads that have less stringent access and authority requirements. DevOps benefits from the scalability that is achievable in public cloud. These environments can be spun up quickly and disassembled once they are no longer needed.

Hybrid Cloud Flexibility: On-premises & Public Cloud Resources

Hybrid cloud offers flexibility because it consists of both private and public cloud resources. Orchestration between on-premises and public cloud resources delivers control and agility, as well as data protection and disaster recovery capabilities.

With hybrid cloud, organizations can use public cloud as a backup environment and synchronize backups for ideal recovery point objectives (RPOs) and recovery time objectives (RTOs). The public cloud resources enable instant failover for quick recovery.

Multicloud: Cloud Models & Multiple Vendor Services

Multicloud allows your company to use cloud models and services from multiple vendors according to their strengths. With multicloud, an organization can choose various types of cloud models and services and avoid being locked into working with a single vendor.

Workloads can be moved to any cloud instance, and multiple clouds can be configured to operate consistently. Multicloud can be used to eliminate shadow IT, move workloads closer to users, and achieve data protection and disaster recovery capabilities.

Weighing Your Cloud Options

All these cloud models are great options and offer economical ways to obtain additional storage capacity and performance power for running applications. Research and consulting firm International Data Corporation (IDC) forecasted that by 2022, 90% of enterprises will be using a combination of private clouds, multiple public clouds, and traditional platforms to build their infrastructures.

Partnering with the right technology provider can help your organization navigate the cloud landscape and find the cloud models and services that will help you design and operate a modern IT architecture.

Clear Technologies has the expertise needed to develop a successful cloud strategy. We take a consultative approach to helping our cloud customers, working with you to assess your goals and challenges and finding the ideal cloud solutions to meet your requirements.

Get help figuring out which cloud model is right for your organization. Ask for a cloud consultation from Clear Tech.

CLEAR TECHNOLOGIES | MAKING STORAGE SIMPLE

Posted on by Admin Clear

Here’s a scary way to put the rise of big data into perspective. Look at these facts from the hosting tribunal – more data was generated in the last two years than ever before in human history. Google averages 1.2 trillion searches annually. Smart devices produce five quintillion bytes of data each day. And we haven’t even touched on Facebook, YouTube and smartphones.

So, how does an organization gather all this valuable data and tame it? Here are the top 7 ways Clear Technologies can simplify data storage to make data work for every size of business:

KEEP RAW DATA RAW

Raw data really doesn’t need to be accessed much. On the rare occasions when it does, raw data will cost more than usual to access, but it’s offset by low storage costs. However, when manipulating raw data, it is always best to manipulate a copy.

SWITCH TO FLASH STORAGE ARRAYS

For on-site storage, a flash array is the way to go. Hard disks have lots of moving parts which can break down or scratch the disk. There are also latency issues that slow down processing speeds. With no moving components, flash arrays are much more durable.

Flash arrays feature high data mobility speeds with microsecond latency. When using the NVMe protocol with flash arrays, storage area networks (SANs) now support thousands of parallel command queues, further bolstering high speeds.

CONSIDER IaaS

When storage infrastructure is in the cloud, companies not only gain floor space, they’ll save money by having less hardware and being able to eliminate the maintenance costs associated with storage servers.

IT staff can focus on projects that generate dollars, as upgrades are done automatically. Additionally, cloud data centers provide enterprise-level security no matter how big or small an organization is.

VISUALIZE DATA

It’s a proven point, human beings respond much faster to visual data. According to Email Audience, the human brain processes images in 13-150 milliseconds, while the time to process 25 words takes 3.75-7.5 seconds. So, a simple chart, graph, or infographic can in essence convey just as much information in a much faster amount of time than the printed word.

When stored data is visualized, noise is removed from the equation and relevant, useful information is brought to the forefront. This allows for a much better understanding of the data, and a much clear interpretation of what needs to be done for the benefit of business.

AUTOMATE

Remember at the beginning of this blog when we talked about how fast big data is growing? Big data sets are now too large to comb through manually. By automating a storage array, tasks are automatically performed that could easily take up days of manual labor. Automation tools also validate and repair data in real time, helping to ensure that data is qualitative, precise, and healthy.

USE VERSION CONTROL

Any time a data set is manipulated, it’s essential to ensure that all versions are saved. Version control will capture all versions of data and store them in cloud storage, providing a singular history of the data and Machine Leaning modules that have been run.

Version control also makes it easy to switch between different data sets for comparison. Managers can then see how a data file has changed over time, as well as records of who had made the changes to the file.

RECORD METADATA

Metadata works just like metatags. Record metadata to describe how data was collected, formatted, and organized. This will make it easier to find data sets when they’re needed at another time. This becomes essential for maintaining historical records of long-term data sets. Recording metadata also extends the longevity of data by countering data entropy and degradation.

START SIMPLIFYING YOUR DATA

Contact Clear Technologies to begin the process of examining your storage infrastructure. We’ll work with you to design and implement a storage solution that will bring speed and clarity to your data sets and analysis.

Get more details on how to prepare for your storage journey by Requesting a Readiness Assessment with Clear Tech.

CLEAR TECHNOLOGIES | HOW Visual One OPTIMIZES STORAGE

Posted on by Admin Clear

With the seemingly exponential growth of data storage, it’s no surprise that storage can take up quite a bit of the company’s bottom line. Forbes polled executives in 2020 and found that 30% of cloud spending is wasted. It’s a good bet that a large amount of this loss is from the storage area network (SAN).

Beyond the price of storage arrays, there are also expenses relating to expansion, maintenance, redundancies, and unused data. The fact that data comes in from different sources and formats, and is unorganized, only adds to the overall cost.

THE ROLE OF Visual One

Visual One Intelligence® provides a single pane of glass reporting for all storage arrays within the company SAN, regardless of vendor or manufacturer. Data throughout the network is normalized and sent back to administrators via visual reports, providing a clear, organized picture of the SAN. From this point, the act of optimizing the SAN can begin in earnest.

LET’S START WITH ASSESSMENT

The first step to optimizing the SAN is to see what comprises the entire storage ecosystem. Detailed reports are run on all existing storage areas to determine how much storage is at each location, the ratio of unused and used storage and if the storage high performance or high capacity.

Then, it’s time to move on to capacity planning and forecasting. A flash analyzer will be used to identify specific workloads that would benefit from being hosted on a flash storage array. A health check will determine if all existing storage arrays are configured correctly and communicating with each other. Additionally, Visual One machine learning will troubleshoot your SAN to quickly identify the root causes of problems.

LUNs (logical unit numbers) will be assigned throughout the network to establish all available data storage and recovery routes. Alternative pathways are then implemented to prevent any partial failures. The entire SAN will be thoroughly analyzed, and then all steps will be repeated for each individual storage array.
Administrators will analyze the data from detailed reports to determine what room your SAN has for future expansion.

NOW IT’S TIME TO OPTIMIZE

By performing file-level analysis with Visual One throughout the SAN, the most used and unused data can be assigned different storage arrays. The data that is most often used will be put on the highest performing storage arrays. Meanwhile, mostly unused storage can be placed in separate arrays or also allocated to solid-state drives or hard disks – less expensive storage array options.

With a combination of Visual One machine learning tools and manual mechanisms, it’s time to move on to provisioning. Integrated analytics across core storage arrays and cloud environments will provide the clarity needed to provision correctly across the whole SAN as well as all connected devices to the network.
Data compression will identify and eliminate statistical redundancy, helping to clear out more available storage space across arrays. Orphaned space can be reclaimed and repurposed for current needs and future requirements.

For the last step, it’s time to gather storage consultants to determine the best cloud migration strategy. Cloud storage is highly recommended as it helps boost speed, performance, and scalability along with providing maintenance duties, enterprise-level security, and disaster recovery.

IT’S TIME TO OPTIMIZE YOUR STORAGE!

Start the conversation with a Clear Technologies SAN expert. Access your virtual storage intelligence assessment here!