Category: Services Spotlight

IaaS Benefits and Options

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.

Our IT Consultants’ Approach to Business Continuity

Planning for Business Continuity

Business continuity focuses on making sure that technology infrastructure is prepared for disaster 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.

Cisco® Unified Computing Services

IT Service Management

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.