Ever hear the phrase: "If the mountain won't come to you, you must go to the mountain"? Well, at SAS, we bring the mountain to you. The Analytics Fast Track™ for SAS®, affectionately called “rolling SAS,” is a partner program between SAS and Intel that showcases the incredible performance of SAS running on the elite Intel® E series chip set.

The AFT provides SAS account teams around the world the ability to quickly develop and deliver customer use-case specific PoC’s onsite.

Why is this so important? Data security. Companies don't want to risk their data, particularly personalized information, by sending it out for a PoC, so they lose out on getting a PoC that's specific to their data and needs. So, we simply take the mountain (secure SAS® software) to you.

The AFT is designed to be stand-alone (i.e. it does not connect to the customers’ network) and comes with its own dedicated wireless router.  The customer provides an “external drive” with the necessary data to be copied onto the server once the server arrives onsite. Once the proof is complete, the software and data are wiped clean before the server is returned to its central hub.

A typical AFT server configuration is 72 core, 3 TB of RAM with 25 TB of SSD storage, running SAS as a VM with a node Hadoop cluster. By deploying SAS via a virtual machine, the AFT environment can be up and running in just a few hours with the architect team developing the proof.

SAS currently has 10 plus AFT servers strategically located around the world. A typical proof runs about 7-10 days depending on the amount of prework that can be accomplished prior to the AFT arriving at the customer's location. Reserve your AFT today -- contact you support team for reservation specifics.

Now that we've covered using the AFT for a proof of concept, be on the lookout for Part II, where I'll cover the “For Purchase” option of the program.