Uncategorized | ClearTechnologies

Red Hat Ansible Workshop

Posted on August 31, 2020March 25, 2021 by DeMond Adkison

April 15th | 1 PM CDT

Clear Technologies Red Hat Ansible Workshop

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Join us April 15th as we take a deeper dive into how Red Hat Ansible amplifies the impact of IT professionals by automating repetitive inefficient task, streamlining IT leading to an increase in revenue.

Below is a sample of what will be covered during the workshop. The workshop will be designed around the specific instances that attendees want to see:

Introduction to Ansible automation
How Ansible works for network automation
Understanding Ansible modules and playbooks
Executing Ansible playbooks to:
- Make configuration changes
- Make routine changes
- Gather information (Ansible facts)
Using Jinja to template network configurations
Using Ansible Tower to scale automation to the enterprise
Configure Cisco switches to work with Ansible

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[Career Opportunity] IBM I Technical Specialist

Posted on June 19, 2020June 19, 2020 by Admin Clear

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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Welcome Mark Reynolds – New Director of Sales

Posted on January 12, 2020June 12, 2020 by Admin Clear

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Mark Reynolds

Director, Sales

Clear Technologies, Inc.

469-360-4083

mreynolds@cleartechnologies.net

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As Director of Sales, Mark’s mission will be to grow the reseller division at Clear Technologies. A key focus for the team will be on new client acquisition, growing the existing client base, bringing on new strategic partners, and working with the other leaders to create new sales processes to keep up with an ever-changing marketplace. Mark will try to build on an already incredible workplace culture which lives by the Clear Technologies Way. The Clear Technologies Way is comprised of 30 fundamental beliefs. These are the values, behaviors, principles and practices that are the foundation for everything that Clear does.

Prior to joining Clear Technologies, Mark was most recently a District Sales Manager for Pure Storage which allows him to bring knowledge of an incredibly competitive, fast-growing segment of the hardware industry with him to Clear. Mark also spent 5 years at Service Express, a third-party maintenance company, where he was employee number one in Texas and helped grow his TOLA team to the top producing region in the company. He brings an extensive background of success in the telecommunications industry where he spent 6 years at Time Warner Cable Business Class and 7 years with Logix Communications. Mark was also a member of the US Army where he served 4 years including deployments to Korea and Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Those who know Mark attribute his success to his ability to get the right people on the bus and creating a culture that breeds high producing teams. He puts the goals and needs of the client above his own and makes every decision revolve around doing the right things all the time. He hates to lose more than he likes to win which drives him to not only write out goals but to work daily to achieve them.

Mark is originally from St. Paul, MN but moved to Texas at a very young age. He received his Bachelor of Science Degree from the University of North Texas. He is married and has 3 sons and a granddaughter which all reside in McKinney, TX.

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Partner Spotlight – Measuring and Monitoring Software Usage

Posted on October 9, 2019April 17, 2020 by Admin Clear

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Are you struggling to manage your software license consumption? Do you have PVU, sockets or RVU licensing? Is your IBM software running in a virtual environment?

The IBM License Metric Tool (ILMT) is a free tool created by IBM to help you measure and monitor software usage. ILMT is a mandatory tool for any company using IBM software in a complex environment, however, getting it up and running, and managing and analyzing the data it collects can be challenging.

If you need assistance setting up or managing ILMT, Clear Technologies software partner, All Blue Solutions, supports hundreds of clients with all different levels of experience with ILMT. All Blue Solutions has deep understanding of IBM software licensing terms and conditions and technical experience working with ILMT. This expertise allows them to help you with everything from installing, configuring, upgrading or managing the infrastructure.

BENEFITS OF ILMT:

Ensures Compliance:Proper use of ILMT allows you to maintain an up-to-date inventory of your software assets and ensure you have the appropriate number of license entitlements so you can maintain continuous license compliance.
Saves You Money:By constantly monitoring your license consumption, you can understand current and predict future consumption providing you with the opportunity to optimize your license costs so you’re only paying for the software you need.
Valuable Data Insights:ILMT provides you with deep insights into your software inventory to help manage your infrastructure. You always know what software, you have, where it is and how its being used.
Constant Audit Readiness:UsingILMT can help reduce the risk and costs associated with a software audit. By constantly monitoring your license consumption, you can avoid any unplanned license compliance settlements.

HOW ALL BLUE SOLUTIONS CAN HELP:

Installation & Configuration:Review of ILMT installation and agent configuration on all servers across the enterprise.
Quarterly Review:Run, maintain, and reconcilequarterly audit reports. Review reports to identify any variances between entitlements and usage.
Free Cloud Hosting:Free cloud hosting of ILMT server saving your staff significant time installing, upgrading, managing and maintaining the server.
Patching & Upgrades:ILMT environment patching and upgrades based in IBM release schedule, and upgrade, maintain and monitor ILMT on an ongoing basis.

To learn more about the benefits of ILMT and how Clear Technologies and All Blue Solutions can help ensure your software license compliance and mitigate risk download our whitepaper. Contact your Clear Technologies rep today!

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Red Hat Ansible

Posted on September 10, 2019August 19, 2020 by Admin Clear

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Red Hat’s Ansible Automation helps organizations turn tough tasks into repeatable playbooks.

Working in IT, you’re likely doing the same tasks over and over. Ansible is a powerful IT automation and orchestration engine easy enough for everyone to use and powerful enough to automate the most complex, multi tear environments including cloud provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, intra-service orchestration, and many other IT needs. Designed for multi-tier deployments, Ansible models your IT infrastructure by describing how all of your systems inter-relate, rather than just managing one system at a time.

Automation frees admins up to focus on efforts that help deliver more value to the business by speeding time to application delivery, and building on a culture of success. Ultimately, Ansible gives teams the one thing they can never get enough of: time. Allowing smart people to focus on smart things.

It uses no agents and no additional custom security infrastructure, so it’s easy to deploy – and most importantly, it uses a very simple language (YAML, in the form of Ansible Playbooks) that allow you to describe your automation jobs in a way that approaches plain English.

With Ansible you can start to do real work in just minutes due to its simple, human-readable language. Altogether its powerful capabilities allow orchestration of your entire application lifecycle regardless of where it’s deployed. And Ansible’s agentless architecture means it is one less thing to keep secure.

When you automate, you accelerate. And when you build a culture of automation across your company, anything is possible.

Contact your Clear Technologies rep to learn how you can work smarter with Ansible.

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Make Hiring Easier and Improve Internal Communication

Posted on August 7, 2019August 19, 2020 by Admin Clear

Hiring the right person for the right seat sounds easy. It’s not. It’s hard, it takes time, it takes patience, and it takes talking to a lot of people. Even then, there is risk. At Clear Technologies, we are unyielding in our search for the best people possible—great people who think like owners, are team driven, know how to get the job done, and have potential to be the best producing “assets” a company could hope to invest in.

With each additional hire, we aim to continue raising the bar so that our culture and team flourish. Every person who joins, especially in small business, is either adding positively to the culture or taking away from it. We have had our share of missteps, just as any small business has, which is why we sought out additional help. We knew there must be a way to improve upon our hiring process.

One of the biggest game-changers for Clear Technologies in 2018 was our partnership with Culture Index. Culture Index aims to help organizations “maximize their bottom line by optimizing the organization from the top down”. Business is a war for talent—plain and simple – especially in the IT space. Culture Index has been a key part of our strategy to hire the best talent possible.

At Clear Technologies, we no longer interview applicants until they have taken a quick 5-minute survey, which gives us their “dot profile”. Their profile tells us more about who they are based on six distinct traits: Autonomy, Social Ability, Pace, Conformity, Logic, and Ingenuity.

Looking at these combined traits helps us to understand how a potential hire will “naturally arrive at decision making, how they prefer to communicate, the pace they prefer to work at, and their conformity towards detail orientation”.

Prior to creating a job description for an available position, we have our team take the same survey for the type of person they think will do best in the role. This gives us a better idea of the profile we are looking to match with our future team member. Imagine that—getting feedback and real data from those who will work most closely with that person, prior to posting a job description. That might seem like a given, but I know most small businesses do not follow that procedure.

In addition to radically altering our hiring process, Culture Index has been utilized to help us better understand each other within the organization. Improving our internal communication has encouraged stronger collaborative efforts amongst our team to more effectively and efficiently serve our clients. As an organization relentlessly dedicated to improving our responsiveness and performance, Clear Technologies is always seeking new and innovative ways to separate ourselves from our competition, and we believe that Culture Index does just that.

If you are interested in taking the survey and learning more about the process, you can do so here. I cannot say enough about what Culture Index has done for our business, and I couldn’t imagine our hiring process without it.

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Realizing Economic Value from SD-WAN

Posted on August 1, 2019April 9, 2020 by Admin Clear

Many vendors have recently come out with “SD-WAN” solutions. One might get the impression it’s very low hanging fruit for any software/systems company who wants to give it a try. What makes SD-WAN seem so simple that anyone could do it? Answer: It actually is simple.The hard part of SD-WAN comes with realizing the economic value that’s always promised by the vendors. Hard economic value can derive from one or more of the following 3 sources:

Reduce WAN cost by shifting traffic to lower cost Internet VPN*
Reduce WAN cost through compression & caching*
Reduce WAN administration cost by using repeatable profiles & cloud-based administration

* – Savings through reducing the size of MPLS links to remote sites. For economic value not including potential WAN performance gains, that’s all there is to it. If we expand the scope to include (potential) performance gains, there can be added value from User Application Experience (UX) and reliability due to:

SD-WAN selects link by traffic type based on application requirements – some apps benefit from fat/cheap Internet VPN bandwidth even though that bandwidth can have unpredictable latency and reliability, other apps can’t tolerate packet loss & latency
Multiple WAN paths including MPLS, Internet VPN, and Cellular/LTE are more resilient than any single WAN path

Note: Firewall functionality not included as it’s not added value, already exists in legacy WAN routers. Two more items of note: Since WAN’s last-mile handoff today is typically Ethernet, the need for an actual router at each site is largely gone. An optimal SD-WAN CPE/endpoint for each site is little more than an x86 server with multiple Ethernet ports, hence the name “Software Defined” i.e. the hardware is commodity. Strangely, total cost for the CPE/endpoint hasn’t changed much, just that cost has shifted from hardware to software.

Lastly, the potential of the SD-WAN “plug-in” software, aka NFV or Network Function Virtualization. This is more of an element of Service Provider SD-WAN that you would get from AT&T or Verizon. Firewalls, Intrusion Prevention Sensors, Data Loss Prevention, and other plug-in solutions can be ordered from the Service Provider (added cost per month). Some see plug-ins as added value but note that SD-WAN from a Service Provider will not focus on reducing your WAN cost, only increasing it.

Ready to begin looking at SD-WAN solutions or any other networking consulting? Fill out our interactive quick assessment to begin realizing the value of software-defined in your environment:[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_btn title=”Quick Assessment” color=”primary” size=”lg” align=”center” css_animation=”fadeInUp” button_block=”true” link=”url:https%3A%2F%2Fwww.battleapp.info%2Fapex%2FLeadForm%3Fformid%3Da0v60000006uWlw%26accountid%3D0016000001HpYpH%26a116000000KNBFLAA5%3DJonathan%2520Long%26a116000000KNBFMAA5%3Djlong%40cleartechnologies.net%26a116000000KNBFKAA5%3D832-453-7841|||”][/vc_column][/vc_row]

Welcome Brett Murphy to the Clear Tech Family!

Posted on July 11, 2019December 11, 2020 by Admin Clear

As a Client Executive and Enterprise Architect with the Clear brand consisting of Clear Technologies, Clear Intelligence and Visual One Intelligence®, Brett Murphy partners with clients and advises them regarding complex enterprise solutions. Brett is focused on Compute, Storage, Secutiry and Software – specifically, architecting highly-available solutions that optimize commercial workloads such as SAP ECC & HANA, Oracle EBS, JD Edwards, PeopleSoft, EPIC, Lawson, Cerner, Infor, JDA and more. Brett is a multi-year IBM Champion, which is part of a formal IBM program to recognize the contributions and subject matter expertise to those in the IBM community but are not employed by IBM.

Brett Murphy is known as a competitive platform specialist proficient with both x86 and RISC server platforms. He helps clients understand the strengths and weaknesses of each platform as it related to individual client business requirements. He specializes in pairing platform capabilities to achieve all desired requirements along with cost savings. Brett has assisted numerous clients control their commercial software licensing and maintenance expenses including one Oracle client where he was able to reduce their $3.5M yearly maintenance expense 70% after 3 years.

Brett Murphy began his career with the United States Army as Electronic Technician. He followed that position by becoming a High-Performance Computing Instructure, teaching RISC / UNIX courses to the US Military, US Government and US Allies, holding a Top-Secret clearance with SCI access. During his 8 years of military service, he graduated from the University of Maryland. Upon leaving the military, Brett joined Sun Microsystems where he had a fruitful 10-year career including positions as a Cluster Specialist, StorageAce and Application Engineer on the Suite of Reliability, Availability and Serviceability products. After Sun, Brett Murphy joined IBM as Pre-sales Architect for IBM’s Power line of products where he worked for 4 years. Brett has worked in the channel since 2009 in technical management and sales roles including his current position as a Client Executive and Executive Architect.

While an IBM Champion and subject-matter expert for IBM’s Power Systems, Brett takes an agnostic approach to solving client issues. You can learn more about Brett Murphy at his blog at http://powertheenterprise.wordpress.com and twitter at @PowerMan4Evr

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Multi Team Membership and How It Can Effect Your Employees

Posted on July 11, 2019August 19, 2020 by Admin Clear

In today’s workplace it is common for employees to work on multiple different teams, but how does this effect your employees and your organization?

Most companies engage in some form of multi-teaming, where employees are on multiple teams at the same time. Across industries, in organizations large and small, statistics show that 65-95% practice multi-teaming. New studies show there are challenges for employees in a multi team environments.

Identity and Belonging

Many times people gain identity from being on a team, but the more teams you stack onto a person, the more they struggle to recognize where they “belong”. When an employee feels they belong to a certain team (high primary team identity) and derives self worth from that belonging, then they are spread out to multiple teams, it can cause a disconnect and infringe on their perception of organizational life. Switching gears and the extra workload can add strain that can tip the scales for an employee considering leaving the firm.

Identity strain is highest, however, when an employee has low primary team identity and belongs to a low number of teams. The employee may not know how they fit into the organization, causing the employee to feel less valued. The number of teams influences the effects of multi-teaming quality on employee outcomes.

SO, how do we avoid these issues?

This research by Dr Sal Mistry looks at both the quantity, the number of teams, and the quality, evidenced by whether there is high or low primary team identification.

Employees that have their identity “grounded” in a primary team should experience fewer negative outcomes. To avoid having employees with both low level of primary team identification and a lower number of multi-team memberships, an organization should strengthen employees’ primary team identification.

If a manager cannot increase belongingness on a primary team, Mistry suggests that an employee should be assigned as many teams as possible. The studies show that for organizations with multi-teaming, regardless of primary team identification, the more number of teams you have, the less strain for employees. This suggests that at a point, the employee will understand working in a multi-team environment and derive worth/identity from their profession or expertise. However, use caution when increasing the number of team memberships as the increased workload can lead to exhaustion and burnout. Either way, managers need to stay aware of how a multi team environment impacts employee well-being.

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HPE Announces New NVMe Storage Options and More at Discover 2019

Posted on July 11, 2019April 9, 2021 by Admin Clear

At Discover 2019, HPE announced new innovations expanding their Intelligent Data Platform to solve major challenges for our customers and drive new levels of enterprise agility.

HPE Primera, mission-critical redefined.

As enterprises become increasingly digital, new storage capabilities are required for mission-critical apps. While traditional high-end storage delivers extreme resiliency and performance, it also holds enterprises back with extreme complexity and administration.

The big storage news from HPE Discover was the announcement of a new high-end storage array called Primera. Positioned above 3PAR in the HPE’s line-up, Primera is designed to compete against Dell’s PowerMax and Pure’s FlashArray//X at the upper edges of the storage market.

HPE Primera delivers the extreme resiliency and performance needed for the most demanding apps, but with the simplicity of the cloud. Enterprises no longer have to sacrifice cloud agility for high-end resiliency.

Primera is a new product, both hardware and software, but its legacy derives directly from 3PAR. Primera’s software stack is based on 3PAR’s operating system. HPE executives said a customer can install a Primera array in their data center on their own in less than 20 minutes, provision storage within seconds, and upgrade the software in five minutes, without rebooting or disrupting services.

HPE engineers based the design on the simplicity of their Nimble storage platform and mission-critical heritage of its high-end storage platform 3PAR StoreServ, and combined them with the intelligence (including AI-powered predictive analytics) of its InfoSight software.

The company’s target customers for Primera are enterprises with large-scale, mission-critical database environments as well as public-sector organizations or service providers looking to consolidate multi-tenant workloads.

HPE Primera radically transforms how high-end storage is deployed, managed, and upgraded – delivering an on-demand experience for instant app access and consumable as-a-service; app-aware resiliency that sees beyond storage with predictive analytics and backed with a 100% availability guarantee; and predictive acceleration with embedded AI for ultra-fast performance at scale for every mission critical app of today and tomorrow.

Extending HPE InfoSight to HPE SimpliVity

HPE SimpliVity is a market-leading HCI platform for data center virtualization and edge workloads. At HPE Discover, HPE announced HPE Simplivity as the first HCI solution to include HPE InfoSight.

HPE InfoSight leverages the power of predictive analytics and machine learning. These capabilities now provide HPE SimpliVity customers with system details for previous capacity consumption, trends, and forecasts to predict when additional hyperconverged nodes will be required. Data protection analytics analyze consumption patterns to identify when backup resources may be at capacity risk, and predictive wellness alerts alleviate common support issues that impact service. These innovative features should save customers time and reduce costs.

It is not surprising to see that HPE InfoSight now supports SimpliVity. InfoSight, HPE’s predictive analytics solution, continues to expand across HPE’s data center portfolio. The AI-driven predictive capabilities inherent in InfoSight once applied to Simplivity, should make HPE SimpliVity strongly competitive due to this differentiator.

HPE Nimble Storage dHCI, simplicity of HCI with the flexibility of converged.

HPE’s Intelligent Data Platform goes beyond the storage layer to deliver the cloud experience on-premise. As IT struggles to scale its operations to meet growing needs, hyperconverged infrastructure delivers the freedom to innovate – on an architecture that is ideal for workloads with predictable growth, scaling compute and storage together.

HPE Nimble Storage dHCI (the “d” stands for “disaggregated”) is a bit of an odd duck. This software was first developed at Nimble before its acquisition by HPE, but updated to meet the current needs of the market.

HPE’s dHCI is a software stack providing the utility of HCI, including single-pane-of-glass manageability for storage and compute through a sophisticated vCenter plug-in. Instead of a dedicated appliance, dHCI runs on a combination of Nimble arrays and HPE ProLiant servers.

HPE Nimble Storage dHCI provides the simplified experience that has driven the success of HCI, while at the same time providing the flexibility of HPE composable infrastructure. It allows compute and storage to scale independently, delivering the right mix of resources for the hosted workloads. Its Nimble legacy ensures that InfoSight integration is there day one, bringing nearly a decade of predictive analytics models to the storage nodes.

HPE is targeting Nimble Storage dHCI at the mid-market where traditional composable infrastructure may be an over-fit, and traditional HCI too limiting.

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