There's recently been a lot of discussion and release of products around high-performance analytic architectures and in-memory computing. It seems like every vendor in the BI and analytics realm has jumped on this bandwagon. Is it all the same stuff? Or are there signficant differences? No question in our minds, the SAS High-Performance Analytics technology family and the SAS Analytics LASR Server for in-memory computing are both radically different than anything else.

The SAS High-Performance Analytics product line includes three distinct and unique approaches:

• SAS Grid Computing, a managed, shared environment for processing large volumes of data and analytic programs quickly using dynamic, resource-based load balancing.
• SAS In-Database Processing, a massively parallel processing (MPP) database architecture for faster execution of key data management and analytic development and deployment tasks.
• SAS In-Memory Analytics, based on the SAS Analytics LASR Server, divides analytic processes into easily manageable pieces with computations distributed in parallel across a dedicated set of blades.

Each of these three categories of SAS technology provide fast results from massive amounts of data,  delivering critical information in real time and speeding the time to business insight. To find out how these products over an advantage over what the competition is trotting out, check out the brief videos from SAS Vice President of Big Data Paul Kent. In the first segment he describes SAS in-database and grid. The second segment highlights SAS in-memory.

You can also learn more on Paul from this topic from this interview at SAS Global Forum: