Category: Uncategorized

Red Hat Ansible

Posted on 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.

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 by Admin Clear

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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 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 by Admin Clear

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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 by Admin Clear

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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 by Admin Clear

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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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Clear Technologies, Inc Recognized on CRN’s 2019 Solution Provider 500 List

Posted on by Admin Clear

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Addison, Texas, June 5,2019–Clear Technologies, Inc., a Dallas-area based Information Technology Services and Solutions Provider, announced today that CRN®, a brand of The Channel Company, has named Clear Technologies, Inc to its 2019 Solution Provider 500 list. This annual list ranks the largest North American IT channel partner organizations by revenue. The Solution Provider 500 is the industry standard for recognizing the highest performing technology integrators, strategic service providers and IT consultants. It is the industry’s predominant channel partner list, serving as a valuable resource for technology vendors looking to partner with top solution providers.

“The rapid development of new technology and information that is important to customers has impacted many solution providers. To say it has not would be false…” said, President, Phil Godwin. “…but what we feel separates us are our core values, that guide us throughout our dealings not only with our clients, but also in determining the direction of our company. Being recognized in the top 500 solution providers is validation of our client first approach.”

“The companies on this year’s list represent an incredible combined revenue of $320 billion, a sum that attests to their success in staying ahead of rapidly changing market demands,” said Bob Skelley, CEO of The Channel Company. “Congratulations to the solution provider organizations leading the way in digital transformation and the latest technology services.”

Clear Technologies began in 1993, purely as a hardware reseller of IBM’s Power line of data center infrastructure, such as the AS/400 line of servers. Clear added a multitude of other product lines to its resell portfolio, but also noticed a shift in the industry that caused them to want to understand the direction clients were headed. This lead to in 2010, the launch of its first homegrown product, Visual One Intelligence™, a storage analytics and reporting SaaS offering.

“At Clear Technologies, we think of transformation as a constant, instead of, as a destination. We invest in our clients by seeking to understand our client’s problems not only for today, but also tomorrow. That is what lead us to launch Clear Intelligence in 2018. We wanted to be prepared to answer the current and future AI/Cognitive needs of our clients” continued Godwin.

The complete 2019 Solution Provider 500 list is available online at www.CRN.com/SP500.

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IBM I Announces V7R4

Posted on by Admin Clear

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For the first time in over three years, IBM i announced a new release, Version 7 Release 4, which is generally available June 21, 2019, for POWER8 and POWER9 processors. With this announcement, the highly integrated IBM i:

  • Improves Scalability and Growth– The new updates allow the IBM i to meet your demands
  • Updates Security– Enhanced Security with tools and implementation of new protocols
  • Adds More Applications– Continues to add industry standards and popular tools
  • Expands 24/7 Capabilities– High Availability and Recovery improves with new options

IBM i systems continue to grow larger for analytics and cognitive workload, as well as, traditional workloads. With IBM Lab Services implementation, IBM i V7R4 will support 192 cores per LPAR as well as more disk capacity. Improved tools for measuring the 8 concurrent tasks (Intel Hyperthreading is 2 concurrent tasks) in the POWER8 and POWER9 network speed accelerates with 100 Gbps Ethernet adapter with options for RoCE (an NVMe protocol). IBM has Statement of Direction to add native IBM i support for Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe). IBM® Power® Enterprise Pools 2.0 allow E980 to more easily share and load balance processors.

The increased importance of security continues, as additional enhancements were included in the recent announcements. On POWER9 servers, PowerVM V3.1 uses on-chip compression/encryption to efficiently and securely move a live and active VM from one local server to another that shares the same storage. IBM i provides a tool to aid in understanding the minimum security to run a program. Also included is the industry standard Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.3, a cryptographic protocol that provides network security between systems and/or users.

Popular industry tools are added in this announcement. Announced for statistics, analysis, and data mining, R programing language is able to take advantage of the 8 concurrent tasks on a POWER9 chip SMT-8, four times more than Intel processors.

The announcement increases the i’s High Availability and Recovery. IBM i data can be saved to the Cloud through BRMS with IBM Cloud Storage Solutions for i. IBM DB2® Mirror for i, available for IBM i 7.4 clients, provides a simplified method of near-continuous IBM i DB2 database replication for local environments.

IBM i users continue to benefit from an integrated, reliable operating system providing an easy to scale and manage environment. Take advantage of Clear Technologies 25+ years of IBM i experience to help integrate those technologies that would benefit your IBM i environment. Our very own Neil Clark has been testing V7R4 for a few months now.

In the past, IBM has supported two levels of IBM i concurrently. Please be aware that with the announcement of V7R4, we are expecting a withdrawal notice for V7R2 soon. Currently, IBM has no announcement of V7R2 support withdrawal, but V7R4 is not generally available until June 21.

Also, POWER7 processors are not supported under V7R4, so IBM has taken the first step in the ending the lifecycle of the entire POWER7 family.

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Storwize V5000 – IBM Announcement & How Clear Can Help

Posted on by Admin Clear

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IBM, on April 2, announced a broad spectrum of innovations, enhancements and new features across their entire storage portfolio, aimed at providing leading-edge solutions for 21stcentury business and technology challenges.

This completes the refresh of the Storwize product line, including the previously refreshed Storwize V7000 line.

With the growth of data, companies are in of need low-risk IT solutions, to do more with fewer resources, and to drive business value from their oceans of data. These requirements make infrastructure automation and intelligence increasingly essential to the successful data-driven company. Organizations are needing to transform and become more agile, to be able to pivot toward new opportunities faster– which their infrastructure must allow.

To address these critical business challenges, IBM announced the new Storwize V5000 family offerings that complement Storwize V7000 Gen3. The new Storwize V5010E and Storwize V5030E models provide increased performance and enterprise-class functionality, availability and reliability in easy-to-buy, easy-to-use, and easy-to-manage entry storage systems.

Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) technology can help lower storage latency, enabling analytics and AI applications powering the new economy. The new all-flash Storwize V5100F and V5100 bring the performance advantages of end-to-end NVMe into a new affordable system. These new members of the Storwize V5000 family combine the proven capabilities of IBM FlashCore technology with NVMe performance and the rich enterprise-class data services of IBM Spectrum Virtualize software-defined storage to create a solution with the capability, scalability, and speed required to support demanding AI and analytics applications.

Multicloud architectures are a powerful new deployment model rapidly sweeping modern business ecosystems. Companies both large and small need to keep some data on premise for increased performance and security, while at the same time moving other data out into the public cloud for increased cost efficiency and business agility. The entire IBM Storwize family, FlashSystem 9100, SAN Volume Controller, and VersaStack leverage the extensive capabilities of IBM Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud to simplify the implementation of multicloud solutions. Now, IBM Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud can be deployed on Amazon Web Services (AWS) as well as on IBM Cloud to increase flexibility and choice.

Businesses need to be focused more on developing new revenue streams and less on repetitive maintenance tasks. That’s where Visual One Intelligence™ comes in at. Visual One Intelligence™ is your single pane of glass for your entire storage environment. Visual One’s reporting and analytics is proven to provide valuable information that can do everything from reduce the time spent on those repetitive maintenance tasks to plan future storage purchases using trend reporting based off storage growth and usage. Before purchasing new storage, use Visual One to truly gain an understanding of your current storage environment, improve efficiency, and even discover unused storage.

IBM is focused on continuing to provide practical, comprehensive, and cost-efficient storage solutions for the real-world business and technology challenges faced by clients. Visual One not only helps you gain an understanding, but it can help you communicate current and future storage needs with management. With Visual One, you are able to learn exactly which workloads in your current environment would be more suitable for the cloud. You are also able to understand which of your current workloads would benefit from being placed on one of the new Storwize V5000 family line.

Contact your Clear Technologies rep to learn more about how the new V5000 storage line and Visual One Intelligence™ could benefit you!

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Clear Technologies HQ move!

Posted on by Admin Clear

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We’ve got some news! We moved!

We are excited to announce that as of April 1, Clear Technologies moved from our old office on Westgrove. We spent the previous five years in a building about a mile away from our new location — our old office served us well, and we made great memories there, but we couldn’t be more excited about our new space.

Luckily, we have not moved far away as we are just down the road in Addison Tower. The growth we have experienced over the past five years called for us to move.

This new office allows us a few benefits:

  1. Location– It is still centrally located in Addison which puts in in the middle of many of our customers and close to all major highways. We now have much more parking space.
  2. Space– We often would invite clients and partners the opportunity to work from our office, but with the growth we needed more room. This move has increased the amount of cubicles and huddle rooms so that we can still offer the ability to work from our office.
  3. New look and Feel– With the move it allowed for us to “modernize” our space to better reflect our transformation as a company.

It has been an exciting three years for Clear, and we look at this new location as the start of another chapter in our history. We’re still working on getting settled in and adding artwork to the walls, but we’re incredibly excited to be in the new space. Be on the lookout for an invitation as we’ll be hosting a happy hour soon for clients and partners, and if you’re in the area, feel free to stop in and say hi!

Thanks for everyone’s support through the years and with the move especially our leadership, Phil Godwin, James Hargis, and Van Symons.

The new address is 16415 Addison Rd Suite 300, Addison, TX, 75001

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