"Do I really need a detailed technical architecture before I start my SAS Deployment?"

 My team gets asked these questions all the time:   Do we really need to spend the time for the above exercise?  Why can’t we just start doing the deployment of SAS and fix issues if they come up? 

The main reason you need more planning upfront is some issues will require you to do a complete deinstall, reconfigure and then reinstall to fix.  This process takes longer than the initial architecture exercise.

There are several very good SAS Global Forum papers that talk about what needs to be accounted for in this exercise.  They will help you cover all the bases before you start the installation and deployment of SAS software: 

• Guidelines for Preparing your Computer Systems for SAS
• Grand Designs: Why It Pays to Think About Technical Architecture Design Before You Act

Additionally, configuring their hardware is another area that we see SAS customers not planning well enough for.  Over time, there have been lots of papers that cover: 

• the best way to configure your hardware
• the operating system you will be using
• the file systems (including shared/clustered file systems)
• the storage array that will be used.  

Resources related to hardware configuration and planning are available in a list of papers useful for troubleshooting system performance problems.  Please bookmark this site as we will be adding more papers here and updating the existing papers here frequently.