[Career Opportunity] IBM I Technical Specialist

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Are you a self-starter and naturally a good problem solver?  Do you know there is only one right answer?  Are you a process oriented individual who excels at improving upon previously established norms?  Do you have an innate sense of urgency and consistently beat deadlines?

If you are an approachable, well spoken individual capable of effective communication and detailed discussions with all levels of IT personnel from administrators to management, then take the first step towards success with Clear Technologies by completing our short survey at the link below:

https://www.cultureindex.com/c/PX97z1X84m

The primary purpose of this position is to design and implement iSeries solutions for our current and new customers.  This position requires providing pre-sales, implementation, and consulting support for a variety for our iSeries customers including technical design and implementation skills for both hardware and software.

 

Primary Duties & Responsibilities

  • Perform enterprise customer assessments including current assessment and future recommendations
  • Must have hands on implementation experience with a iSeries LPAR environments including familiarity with:
    • VIOS Implementation
    • External Storage solution design and implementation
  • In conjunction with the Sales team, take an iSeries opportunity through the complete lifecycle of solution architecting, system configuration, implementation and on-going support.
  • Bring current knowledge and future vision of IBM Power solutions to sales and technical teams to maintain the company’s competitive position
  • Write statements of work for implementation and ongoing management of IBM Power solutions sold by Clear technologies.
  • Assist with proposals, presentations and responses to client requests
  • Build strong technical relationships with clients, IBM Power CTSs and coworkers
  • Escalating to Vendor Support and project managing critical issues
  • Drive automation and efficiency in clients’ environments
  • Be an active user of Clear Technologies’ storage reporting and analytics service, Visual One Intelligence®, for assisting you in all storage analysis opportunities as well as participate in implementation and recommendation of Visual One to all storage customers.

Basic Qualifications

  • At least five (5) years of experience developing and implementing iSeries solutions
  • At least two (2) years of experience analyzing complex infrastructure environments and making recommendations to meet business requirements
  • Demonstrated ability to structure, organize and storage projects
  • Demonstrated communication, documentation and presentation skills
  • Demonstrated ability to multitask and to prioritize workload under tight deadlines in a fast-paced environment and ability to delegate when appropriate
  • Experience with mission critical systems in multi-site environments
  • IBM Power System Technical certifications for sales and implementation

ISeries includes IBMi, Power Systemssss and PowerVM including VIOS

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Cloud, Power, & Your SAP Environment

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Seemingly the majority of folks are discussing the cloud. Some have details so they are cautious, and others are blindly following lemmings off the cliff. New ideas garnish the press and so has cloud. What does it mean? What is the impact on your business? Who is the right provider? Should I move my SAP to the cloud? The questions seem endless.

What is the core business reasons you are considering the cloud? Cost? Change of resourcing? Do you expect better service? Are the service levels defined, and were they defined by IT, by the business or by both?

In a recent CIO magazine article, Liz Hebert of Forrester indicated that the ubiquitous nature of the cloud has some inherent issues. In the very same article, Greg Meyers CIO at Motorola indicated that the change creates issues, I would offer that change also takes time to develop into acceptable standards. Are these two individuals outside the norm? I think not and I applaud them for bringing to the forefront a couple of issues plaguing real cloud success.

Should you abandon the cloud? That is not the solution, but like any tool, proper selection and fit must be determined. One-size does not fit all. The cloud is, like any tool, very good in some considerations and risky at best in others. Adopting Cloud strategies require other foundational business strategies to be refined. Move it and they will come is not a good strategy.

What strategy is emerging? Well, the hybrid strategy is gaining a great position. A strategy where a customer virtualizes on-premise for Production workloads and leverages public cloud for other workloads. This strategy allows control of, and perimeter hardening of the data.

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POWER TO THE RESCUE

Few environments lend themselves to a corporate cloud better than IBM Power. Being one of the two environments certified to run SAP HANA demonstrates its considerable prowess. Once the darling of SAP, Hasso stated that ‘it was evident that the idea (HANA) was good but the environment (Intel) could not scale’. In the demonstrations of the actual capabilities of IBM Power, it became clear that leveraging the innate capabilities of Power Systems virtualization and the ability of the Power processor to do 2-3x the work of Intel-based solutions. SAP and other cloud providers are leveraging IBM Power as a workhorse for their HANA clients. Incrementally when you understand how LARGE environments that can be virtualized, you also realize that size does not have to fit-all as IBM Power is suitable for very small to the largest HANA implementations. We have assisted many customers to realize significant, real savings with they chose to host SAP on-premises or with a cloud provider.

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S/4 HANA Implementation
Let us start with a real use case. You are performing a Greenfield implementation of S/4HANA. The sizing completed early on in the project now concerns you as change orders come in (and they will) there will be changes in the SAP Quick Sizer report that now require re-sizing. Outages have timeline and resource implications negatively affecting the business due to unnecessary outages. If in resizing, you discover a larger environment is needed, re-allocating with Intel systems could require new systems to accommodate additional capacity not to mention many reconfigurations likely require an outage. With IBM Power, there are few situations where an outage is required as many if not most activities may be performed concurrently. Once running in production, processor cores, memory, and I/O can be dynamically (re-)allocated power assets further eliminating the need for an outage.

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The second use case is a bit more complex; you are performing a Brownfield implementation of S/4HANA. In this case, make a copy of the production database into a Sandbox environment. If currently running SAP ECC on IBM Power, you may be able to allocate existing compute, memory and I/O resources to this test environment. If not, we offer temporary capacity to allow an initial evaluation. Next, build your S/4HANA environment using the HANA DB & AS sample sizing from the original ECC’s SAP Scripts. An often-overlooked benefit to testing but also deploying a full HANA environment consisting of DB + AS onto IBM Power is its internal network switching capability. The ability for VM to VM network communications, which occur over the memory bus, without having to leave the server provides an ultra-fast response, high bandwidth, and low latency. This small consideration reduces external network traffic while allowing DMO migrations over the network to exploit the speed of the memory subsystem. When we have done this, it is not uncommon to see DMO functions in the 1-2 days rather than the 4-5 days which is a big acceleration to your project timelines.

Devil raises his head!
Ok, so the two business cases described sound simple and they are real. The devil is in the details and we would love the opportunity to discuss your landscape needs and advise you on all possible options. Don’t be surprised when you also learn that IBM Power will cost less than Intel when fully deployed. This isn’t a hidden fact, just one many are unaware of. Working together, we can help you find the best blend to your business needs and whether or not an on-premises, cloud or hybrid is the right fit.

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[1] ”one of the biggest challenges I see is the one-size-fits all nature of the cloud.”  “Simplicity and ubiquity drive the many benefits, but the change can be a huge challenge for CIO’s moving to environments that do not play favorites or tailor to special interests”  “the cloud offers take-it-or-leave it approach”
Liz Hebert, VP Forrester Research
[1] “The biggest mistake I’ve seen others make, and we are trying to avoid that, was underestimating the change to employees and being unprepared to support them through the trauma of changing the tools they have used for decades to manage the new normal” 
Greg Meyers, CIO/VP Motorola systems
[1] SAP Magazine – E3 Professor Hasso plattner chose his first partner for in-memory computing database Hana poorly. Together with Intel, he and his team and the Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI) in Petsdam, Germany, came up with a concept for in-memory-databases. Eight years later, it becasue clear that the concept was right – but the hardware and the concept of applications were a porr fit.
[1] Power virtualization is hardware level virtualization, as such it does not require incremental processing to leverage and has no impact on performance.

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SAP HANA on IBM Power Resources

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The purpose of this article is to provide a single source of commonly used, hard to find and convenient material to help SAP shops and Architects properly evaluate, design, deploy and support SAP HANA using IBM Power Systems.

This article is a living document updated and supported by Brett Murphy and his SAP Practice at Clear Technologies. With over 25 years of industry experience working with Enterprise solutions, Brett is an IBM Champion specializing in SAP and SAP HANA environments.

Are you running SAP ECC today? Consider scheduling an SAP HANA Readiness Workshop or schedule a meeting to learn how other clients saved 35% over competing solutions.

To learn more, please visit Clear Technologies SAP Practice.

Visual One Intelligence® (Visual One)

Visual One simplifies your storage management process by organizing independent data elements into a unified, visual analysis across your multi-vendor storage environment. Ideal to identify orphaned space, improve application response complaints, capacity planning, reporting, problem determination and right-sizing storage which often leads to cost savings. Ideal for SAN, NAS and VMware environments especially SAP ECC shops looking to migrate to SAP HANA.

SAP Resources

SAP Press

Influencers

IBM Resources

IBM Blogs

Persistent Memory (PMEM)

SUSE Resources

Red Hat Resources

*ASUG Resources

  1. *Licensing

Reliability

As of 2019, for the 11th straight year, IBM Power Systems were named the most reliable platform in Information Technology Intelligence Consulting’s (ITIC) 2019 Global Server Hardware and Server OS Reliability survey.

Common SAP Notes

Learn More

Consider scheduling a no-cost SAP HANA Readiness Workshop to discover how prepared your business is to move to HANA as well as hosting options. To learn about hosting a workshop or for general questions about our SAP practice, please visit Clear Technologies SAP Practice. To learn about our core business offerings, visit Clear Technologies, Visual One Intelligence®, and the AI practice; Clear Intelligence.

About the author: Brett Murphy is a Client Executive and Executive Architect at Clear Technologies. With over 25 years of industry experience working with Enterprise solutions, Brett is an IBM Champion specializing in SAP and SAP HANA environments. Follow on twitter @PowerMan4EVR and blog https://powertheenterprise.wordpress.com.

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Clear Technologies Named to CRN’s 2020 Solution Provider 500 List

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Addison, Texas June 2, 2020 Clear Technologies announced today that CRN® a brand of The Channel Company, has named Clear Technologies to its 2020 Solution Provider 500 list. Each year, CRN releases its list of top 500 solution providers, a ranking of the leading IT channel partner organizations across North America by revenue. CRN’s Solution Provider 500 list serves as the industry’s benchmark for recognizing the top-performing technology integrators, strategic service providers, and IT consultants, and as a valuable resource for technology vendors looking to partner with top solution providers.

For over 25 years Clear Technologies has been a leading IT reseller and service provider. Leveraging this legacy business and the opportunity to work closely with clients, Clear launched Visual One Intelligence® (Visual One), storage analytics and reporting SRMaaS, in 2010. Looking into the future, Clear found new ways to provide clients with real business value and in 2018 launched Clear Intelligence. With a business-first approach, Clear Intelligence is focused on understanding the key challenges and potential opportunities for AI solutions for organizations to create a competitive advantage.

“The rapid development of new technology and information that is important to customers has impacted many solution providers. At Clear Technologies, we think of transformation as a constant, instead of, as a destination. We invest in our clients by seeking to understand their problems not only for today, but also tomorrow. Being recognized in the top 500 solution providers is validation of our client first approach,” said Clear Technologies President, Phil Godwin.

“CRN’s Solution Provider 500 list showcases the top IT channel partner organizations across North America,” said Bob Skelley, CEO of The Channel Company. “This year, companies on this list represent a combined revenue of $393 billion, a data point that underscores the impact and influence these solution providers have on the IT industry. On behalf of The Channel Company, I’d like to congratulate these companies for their outstanding contributions to the growth and success of our industry.”

CRN’s complete 2020 Solution Provider 500 list is available online at www.CRN.com/SP500 and a sample from the list will be featured in the June issue of CRN Magazine.

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Infrastructure as a Service – IaaS

IaaS Benefits and Options
iaas

Infrastructure as a Service

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is an emerging trend in IT that fundamentally changes the financial model for IT infrastructure.  With IaaS, companies no longer purchase infrastructure – they pay a fee for what they use. An advantage of not owning a physical infrastructure is that companies lease capacity based on fluctuating business needs. Infrastructure as a Service is a cloud-based solution delivered via a public or private cloud installation. IaaS solutions replace the traditional corporate data center or hosting facility and provide organizations with all infrastructure including servers, network, storage, and bandwidth.

The core benefits of Infrastructure as a Service are:
  • Eliminates the capital expenditure for infrastructure
  • Distributes infrastructure maintenance responsibilities to a service provider
  • Removes life cycle management responsibilities of physical infrastructure
  • Increases scalability and allows for rapid expansion or contraction based on business needs
  • Allows infrastructure to become an operational cost
  • Aligns IT costs with business needs
RapidScale CloudServer for IaaS

Clear Technologies offers public Enterprise-Grade infrastructure in the Cloud through its partnership with RapidScale.  RapidScale’s CloudServer solution eliminates the need to spend capital on physical hardware by providing virtual, Enterprise-Grade hosted servers.  With the CloudServer managed solution, there is no longer a need to worry about patches, updates, troubleshooting, or user management.  CloudServer is backed by vCloud hypervisors, Net App ® storage, and the Cisco ® UCS blade chassis.

IBM Softlayer® Private Cloud

For customers who prefer a private cloud infrastructure, Clear Technologies works with partners like IBM Softlayer® to create customized, private cloud, IaaS solutions. Private clouds built on bare metal servers allow for implementation of any virtualization technology.  The primary benefits of private clouds are:

  • No shared resources
  • Easier application development and deployment
  • Rapid, flexible scalability
  • Easy geographic expansion to data centers around the world

Clear Technologies helps customers develop and deploy both public and private Infrastructure as a Service solutions. Our IaaS solutions help companies reach the next level of productivity and turn IT technology into a competitive advantage.

Business Continuity with IBM PowerHA

Our IT Consultants’ Approach to Business Continuity

Planning for Business Continuity

Business continuity focuses on making sure that technology infrastructure is prepared for business continuitydisaster and resilient enough to keep companies functioning during an emergency.  The IT consultants at Clear Technologies analyze a company’s current environment to identify the key products and services, and the most important activities that underpin them.  Once that analysis is complete, our IT consultants devise a plan for continued operations in the event of planned or unplanned outages.

Business continuity plans enable companies to recover quickly and effectively from any type of disruption.  Having a continuity plan provides the framework to lean on in a crisis.  Business continuity planning also provides stability and security.

High Availability

High availability (HA) refers to systems that are durable and likely to operate continuously without failure.  The objective of a high availability solution is to provide near-continuous availability for business critical applications through any type of outage.  A key to continuity planning is configuring business critical applications within a clustered environment dedicated to operations continuity.

IBM PowerHA Solution

The PowerHA enterprise edition enables companies to extend the data center cluster to a remote location environment for business continuity.  The PowerHA solution makes business continuity testing simple while putting the operator in charge of managing failover policies and procedures.  IBM’s PowerHA provides the capability for a cluster to span two sites with the storage and servers cross coupled in a manner that keeps the application resilient through an outage of either a storage server or a production server.

Geographically dispersed clusters are deployed in either a stretched or linked cluster configuration.  Stretched clusters contain nodes from sites in the same location.  Linked clusters contain nodes from sites at different geographical locations.  Through IBM’s Power HA, businesses can define a remote, cluster configuration that better ensures business continuity.

The IT consultants at Clear Technologies work with organizations to provide business continuity solutions that fit their needs.  Our IT experts have years of experience working with IBM PowerHA and have the expertise to provide the best continuity plans for businesses.

Data Recovery Trends

From Data Recovery to Resilience

Virtual Data Replicationdata recovery

Virtual data replication is a key trend in data recovery.  Companies use data replication to safeguard against the catastrophic loss and cost of being unable to recover data from a system failure.  Today’s virtual environments require disaster recovery solutions that work with Virtual Machines (VMs).  Zerto’s disaster recovery solutions are specifically designed for virtual environments.  Clear Technologies partners with Zerto to provide clients customized data recovery solutions.

Zerto Virtual Replication

Zerto Virtual Replication is built from the ground-up to be a simple, yet powerful data recovery solution for virtualized infrastructures.  Whether a virtual environment is based in VMware vSphere or Microsoft Hyper-V, Zerto Virtual Replication delivers enterprise-class disaster recovery.  Zerto works across private clouds, public clouds, hybrid clouds and satellite offices.  Zerto includes data recovery operations in a single solution that:

  • Recovers one, all, or a subset of any virtualized application
  • Replicates and recovers data from any location to any other storage location
  • Maximizes the benefits of virtualization
Data Recovery to IT Resilience

The potential loss of critical data and applications drives companies to develop business continuity, data recovery, and disaster recovery solutions.  Innovations in storage, data management, and replication create an opportunity for companies to move beyond data recovery towards IT Resilience.

IT Resilience occurs when the response to a disaster or disruption takes place without impacting users and customers.  With IT Resilience the focus changes from data and operational recovery to continuous availability.  IT Resilience solutions from Zerto are not dependent on:

  • Hypervisors
  • Hardware
  • Clouds

Zerto data recovery solutions incorporate new technology processes and procedures without disrupting business operations.

Zerto Cloud Continuity Platform

Zerto’s Cloud Continuity Platform is an evolution of Zerto Virtual Replication.  With the Zerto Cloud Continuity Platform organizations can withstand any disaster, confidently embrace change, and focus on their business.  Along with enabling IT Resilience the Continuity Cloud Platform:

  • Is a true Hybrid cloud solution
  • Helps recover from any disaster
  • Replicates locally, to a private cloud, or to a public cloud
  • Simplifies migration
  • Enables innovation and modernization of the data center

Clear Technologies utilizes Zerto solutions to create custom data recovery solutions for our customers.

Frameworks for IT Service Management (ITSM)

Cisco® Unified Computing Services

IT Service Managementitsm

IT Service Management (ITSM) must focus on achieving business objectives. This involves ensuring that fundamental metrics for ITSM be tied to business goals rather than specific measurables.  ITSM is a strategic approach for designing, delivering, managing, and improving the way organizations use technology.

IT Service Management utilizes the right processes, people, and technologies so the organization can meet its objectives.  ITSM aligns the delivery of IT services with the needs of the organization, employees, and customers.  Key outcomes for effective programs include increased efficiency and minimized waste.  IT Service Management is becoming more important for enterprises due to:

  • Big Data
  • Self-service provisioning
  • Bring your own everything (devices and apps)
IT Service Management conforms to multiple standards
  • COBIT: Provides governance and management practices for information technology (IT)
  • Microsoft Operations Framework: Concepts for the entire lifecycle of an IT service from concept to replacement
  • ISO 20000: Global standard that describes the requirements for an ITSM system
  • ITIL: global standard for ITSM frameworks, consist of five parts: strategy, design, transition, operations, and continuous improvements
Cisco® Unified Computing Services

Today, enterprises are striving to move toward standards based on ITSM.  The complexity of data centers makes it increasingly difficult to coordinate the efforts of server, network, and storage administrators.  In effect, these subject matter experts must carefully coordinate their actions with each other by following a time-consuming process. This includes manually configuring firmware updates, BIOS parameter settings, interface configurations, and access-layer interconnect configurations for the LAN and SAN.

Cisco® UCS Manager overcomes these problems by shifting administration tasks away from a disjointed individual-system configuration that lacks accuracy and visibility. Administrative tasks move to a role- and policy-based system configuration that provides transparency across the entire system.  By integrating network, storage access, and virtualization into a unified, cohesive system, Cisco® UCS Manager reduces total cost of ownership, while increasing business resiliency and agility.

Clear Technologies ITSM consultants utilize Cisco® UCS and other tools to deploy IT Service Management solutions that increase efficiency, reduce costs, and deliver competitive advantages.

Server Virtualization with VMware

Clear Technologies’ Solution for Server Virtualization

What is Server Virtualizationsystem-1527684_1920

Server virtualization is the process of creating a software-based representation of a physical server.  Server Virtualization is the single most effective way to reduce IT expenses while boosting efficiency and agility for all sized businesses.  Clear Technologies uses VMware to increase IT agility, flexibility, and scalability while creating significant cost savings.

How VMware Virtualization Works

Server virtualization with VMware uses software to simulate the hardware and create a virtual computer system.  Virtualization allows businesses to run multiple operating systems and applications on a single physical device.  Within IT infrastructures, virtual computer systems are known as “virtual machines” . Virtual machines (VM) are an isolated software container with an operating system and application inside.

Each self-contained VM works independently.  Putting multiple VMs on a single device enables several operating systems and applications to run on just one physical server.  A thin layer of software called a hypervisor decouples virtual machines from the host and dynamically allocates resources to each virtual machine as needed.

Server virtualization provides economies of scale and increased efficiency.  By using server virtualization, companies maximize their server resources and reduce the amount of hardware required for their operations.  This results in server consolidation which improves efficiency and reduces costs.

Benefits of Virtualization

Benefits of virtualization include: faster workload deployment, performance, and increase in server availability.  Operations become automated resulting in IT that’s simpler to manage and less costly to own and operate.

Additional benefits of VMware include:
  • Minimize or eliminate downtime
  • Increase IT productivity and responsiveness
  • Provision applications and resources faster
  • Enable business continuity and disaster recovery
  • Simplify data center management
  • Build a true Software-Defined Data Center

Our server virtualization specialists at Clear Technologies will work with your organization by assessing your current IT infrastructure.  They will recommend the virtualization plan that works best for your organization.  Contact Clear Technologies today and learn how we can help you use technology to create a competitive advantage.

Network Attached Storage (NAS) is better with Visual One

Improve NAS efficiency with Visual One Intelligence®®

IBM NAS storage Visual One managesNetwork Attached Storage (NAS) is an exceptional solution for customers who wish to quickly and extensively share files within their network. The reasonable cost of NAS devices has led to expanding usage by organizations, and has led to the development of clustered NAS solutions by IBM and other storage hardware suppliers.

Regardless of the storage technology used, the need for storage continues to expand exponentially. Storage demand is primarily driven by unstructured data, which is defined as data that is not part of a relational database. NAS solutions are specifically designed for storing this type of unstructured data. The increase in required storage creates a critical need to effectively manage NAS and other storage solutions to maximize their efficiency and to plan for future storage needs. In response to this need Clear Technologies offers Visual One Intelligence® ® (Visual One). Visual One provides storage analytics on demand and provides customers with infinite storage visibility without the need for additional tools, equipment, or data gathering.

Visual One is a Software-as-a-Solution product that allows customers to realize their current storage capacity, determine how much file duplication exists, efficiently reallocate storage, and plan for the future. For NAS solutions, Visual One quickly provides a snap shot of current storage usage across all drives and clusters identifying load issues, allowing for reallocation and identifying potential future needs. Key benefits of Visual One for NAS solutions are:

1. Determining the cost and storage savings that could be achieved by implementing deduplication features.
2. Identifying how much storage requirements could be reduced by utilizing compression technology.

 

Visual One reports are delivered via a series of visual graphics highlighting storage utilization. These reports largely eliminate the need for developing complicated, and often inaccurate, tracking spreadsheets. Visual One is available for a wide array of NAS and other storage systems including the full range of IBM solutions.

Many customers utilize NAS solutions because of their faster data access, easier administration, and simple configuration. Adding Visual One to this equation provides even better efficiency and utilization without the need for any additional hardware. Visual One 4.0 was launched on April 12, 2016 and provides several additional benefits:

1. Expanded business unit reporting with drill down
2. Improved user experience
3. Additional flexibility

 

A NAS solution from IBM and other manufacturers combined with Visual One will let customers make better storage decisions, reduce storage costs, lower complexity, and improve storage performance and utilization.