Author: Admin Clear

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

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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

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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

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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)

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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

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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

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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.

Managed Services for IT Infrastructure

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Managed Services make IT more strategic

Clear Technologies provides Managed Services to clients to allow their IT departments to managed servicesfocus on the business’ strategic initiatives.  In today’s business environment, IT departments are challenged to not only maintain their current infrastructure, applications, and operations but also make strategic contributions.

Companies Challenge IT to:
  • Free up IT resources for strategic initiatives
  • Improve their cost structure
  • Provide optimum service levels to the business
  • Mitigate infrastructure and system risks

IT departments increasingly require help to maintain IBM iSeries and other technology infrastructures.

Managed Services provides an answer

Managed Services provide external resources to plan, operate and optimize IT infrastructures.  Service providers have developed systems and procedures to constantly monitor performance, proactively diagnose issues, and resolve problems.  A primary element of an effective service program is easy access to infrastructure, systems, and applications expertise.  Key components of service agreements include:

  • 24x7x365 support
  • Real time monitoring
  • Infrastructure and application specific expertise
  • Contingency and emergency plans
  • Life cycle and upgrade planning and implementation

These solutions help companies free up resources from day-to-day operations.  Managed Service solutions include: systems management, operations management and support, device management, and recovery services.

The core benefits of Managed Services are:
  • Economies of scale
  • Operational efficiency
  • Minimized downtime
  • Reduced cost
  • Specialized expertise
  • Access to the latest IT technology
Clear Technologies Managed Services

Clear Technologies provides a comprehensive suite of Managed Services for IBM iSeries, System I, and AS/400 infrastructures.  Under Managed Services from Clear Technologies, mission critical systems and applications do not go down.  Core Managed Services include:

  • Database hosting
  • Server allocation
  • Remote technical operations management
  • High availability solutions
  • Data recovery
  • 24x7x365 support

Clear Technologies provides expertise and effective cost management that creates operational efficiencies, trouble-shooting capabilities, system and application updates and recommendations on emerging technologies.

Clear Technologies uses Managed Services to turn IT infrastructure into a competitive advantage for companies.

3004-010 Failed setting terminal ownership and mode

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3004-010 Failed setting terminal ownership and mode

Hopefully you or someone else is only encountering this while trying to login to an AIX system. If you already have a login session open on the system it may be an easy fix, if you don’t, and NO ONE else does either, it’s a bit more complicated.

Backstory

This is based on a real world customer experience I had on Halloween night 2019. Though I did find some online info to help it took a while. I’m doing this in hopes that it’s another hit that will help others with more detail.

So customer’s users started getting this error when trying to login, though all had been working fine all day. The short story is, it was the result of the /etc/group file getting overwritten by mistake with another file.

Before reading on, IF you have encountered the 3004-010 error AND you still have an active login somewhere on the system, you can simply open the /etc/group file and cut/paste contents from another /etc/group file from another system, or restore it from a mksysb, and save a lot of time and grief. Remember right now you can’t do any new scp or anything remotely to the box.

The long story, after the problem was encountered it was decided to reboot the system for reasons I am unaware. It was hard rebooted via the HMC. Upon bootup, many messages, 0513-012 and 0481-002, about failures to start daemons/process were encountered because of user id and no recognized group in /etc/group. This is the point in which I got engaged via an SOS call. Specifics shown below:

Recovery

In this case it required another bootable AIX image and boot into SMS mode to use it. The typical options are boot from a mksysb or AIX install ISO of the same level via either a NIM server, VIOS virtual optical, or physical DVD. In this exact case, the machines were full system LPARs w/o a NIM server or VIOS, we actually resorted to physical media.

Via Media

We did this by activating the profile, via HMC, then chose advanced, then SMS, then ok (twice). After a few minutes we get a prompt to press 1 for console and hit enter, then 1 for English, then on next menu chose 3 to enter single user mode.

Chose the rootvg disk (or what you think it is) and it will it show lvs that belong to that vg and if it looks like rootvg then chose that one. If not, repeat until you find it. Then Chose #1 to access root volume group. This mounted filesystems for us.

We ran /etc/methods/cfg64 so our commands would work right. We copied /etc/group to /etc/group.orig. We did find the contents of /etc/group actually had /etc/sudoers contents in it. It would appear the sudoers file was copied over the group file some how. But what it was wasn’t as important as what it wasn’t. In this case they had some previous copies of /etc/group so we copied one over from a couple days back simply to get the system bootable again.

Once booted, we were able to login as root, then scp a prod version of the group file over and all was well again.

Via Clone

However, another potential option is, if available, booting from an existing clone of rootvg. In my case the customer did have a clone, however, it really didn’t come to light they did until AFTER we were able to successfully boot and login. That got me thinking we could’ve booted into SMS mode, and chose the clone rootvg disk instead, and finished normal booting. Then we could wake up the original rootvg, copy the cloned /etc/group file over, put the original rootvg back to sleep, set bootlist and reboot from the original rootvg again. So I tested this theory and proved it to be successful as follows.

In this test I intentionally clobbered the /etc/group file and rebooted the system to produce the errors and problem as previously described. I did then SMS boot from the cloned disk. I woke up the “old_rootvg”, which is the real/original/current rootvg that the bad group file is on, via:

alt_rootvg_op –W –d hdisk0

This mounts the other rootvg filesystems with alt_inst in front of their paths. I checked both versions of the group file group existed. They did and differed greatly. I actually saw /etc/hosts info in the original version of the group file.  I simply copied the group file from my clone copy over the original version that is currently available in /alt_inst/etc as shown below. If though the group file is trash I still make a copy of it first.

cp –p /alt_inst/etc/group /alt_inst/tmp/group

cp –p etc/group /alt_inst/etc/group

Then I put the original rootvg back to sleep <VERY IMPORTANT STEP as you can corrupt it if you don’t prior to rebooting> and then change bootlist to boot from it as shown both below in text and screenshots. Then after successful reboot, login as normal and enjoy the rest of your day.

alt_rootvg_op –W –s hdisk0

bootlist –m normal hdisk0 hdisk1

shutdown -Fr

alt_disk_copy hangs on mkszfile

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alt_disk_copy hangs on mkszfile

Backstory

This occurred after I created a clone of existing system, ultimately with the intent to test upgrade, and brought up a test lpar on the newly created clone. I also enabled ghostdev to eliminate it coming up with same IP, vgs, etc.

Problem

I wanted to update rootvg by cloning and updating the clone at the same time. When executing the command it just hung

# alt_disk_copy -b update_all -l /mnt/7232 -B -d hdisk1
Calling mkszfile to create new /image.data file.
^CCleaning up.

Solution

I learned that this was a by product of having the original systems /etc/filesystems file that still had the cloned systems filesystems in it. I have learned in the past, and failed to do so this time, that when cloning a system like this to make a copy of /etc/filesystems, remove all non-rootvg entries in the original before making the clone. Then of course copy the original back into place post clone creation. Once I removed the additional entries the command ran just fine.