Clearpath’s Blog on IT Infrastructure, Hybrid Clouds and IT Security

Reston, VA, June 8, 2020 – Clearpath Solutions Group announced today that CRN_® a brand of The Channel Company, has named Clearpath as #315 on the 2020 Solution Provider 500 list, moving up 13 spots from #328 in 2019. 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.

Back in March, VMware introduced their application modernization strategy and with it, the biggest release of vSphere in over a decade. This followed the VMware ‘Project Pacific’ announcement Joe Beda made during VMworld 2019 where he made the remark "Kubernetes is a platform for creating platforms."

VMware makes very good use of the intellectual property gained by the Heptio acquisition and fully adopts Kubernetes into vSphere by leveraging Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG). This allows centralized management of both virtual machines and containers from the interface we all know and love, vCenter Server. Sound familiar? Yes, vSphere Integrated Containers aimed at a similar result minus Kubernetes a few years back. This time around, however, VMware fully embraces Kubernetes with TKG and provides the vSphere Pod Service as well as namespaces and several other services which together improve performance, security, access, and management of Kubernetes in a vSphere environment. There is plenty to be excited about here.  

Remote employee initiatives just skipped the line to be the most important item on many organizations’ IT to-do lists. In an effort to make sure you are aware of what our partners VMware, Cisco and Dell EMC are doing to help support remote employees, we put together a list of vendor initiatives as well as other important information to help you through the challenging times.

User experience is the driving force behind an organization's digital transformation strategy. There is a direct relationship between customer satisfaction and the ability to acquire and retain new customers. Applications play center stage as most products and services are delivered through websites, mobile applications, or both. Microservices-based applications give businesses the ability to more granularly iterate and scale their applications based on customer feedback. This is directly tied to happier customers and increased revenue. As more businesses look to drive innovation using containers and microservices, they face some major headwinds, not least of which is standardizing on Kubernetes to accelerate their application modernization efforts.

The COVID-19 (Coronavirus) outbreak is causing a tremendous amount of uncertainty as the virus continues to spread globally. At Clearpath, we pride ourselves on customer service and satisfaction. We wanted to share the steps we are taking to ensure our customers continue to receive exceptional service and support during this challenging time.

Reston, VA, February 27, 2020 – Clearpath Solutions Group, IT Solutions That Power Your Business, announced today that CRN_®, a brand of The Channel Company has named Clearpath to its 2020 Managed Service Provider (MSP) 500 list in the Elite 150 category. This popular list identifies North American solution providers that deliver operational efficiencies, IT system improvements, and a higher rate of return on investments for their customers. These accomplished MSPs work tirelessly to guide their customers and create solutions for complex IT issues.

Cisco Meraki recently released a new product called the Meraki MG Cellular Gateway which Cisco SVP Todd Nightingale believes will be the fastest-launching Meraki product of all time (https://www.crn.com/cisco-takes-aim-at-cradlepoint-enters-new-market-with-meraki-cellular-gateway). We at Clearpath think that Meraki's new line definitely solves a problem with remote network connectivity that a lot of our clients have. With that being said I’ll now cover the following: what does it do, what is its significance, and should your organization be considering it?

Back in the early 2000s VMware transformed the datacenter giving birth to the ‘cloud’ when they brought ESX server to market. Since then, VMware has continued to innovate both organically and via acquisition helping customers cut costs and increase revenue all while giving customers a jump start to their digital transformation journey. Cloud Foundation aims to decrease complexity, increase cloud adoption, and better align IT resources to business outcomes.