I was privileged with the opportunity to present a couple of papers at SAS Global Forum 2015 in Dallas, Texas this year.  While there, I was also excited to attend presentations with new and inventive approaches for working with the administration and architecture of SAS solutions. This is a collection of just a few of my favorites.

SAS 9.4 MIDDLE TIER

The new middle tier technologies introduced with the release of SAS 9.4 have significantly improved the performance, scalability, and availability of our web services.

• SAS1904-2015: Your Top Ten SAS® Middle-Tier Questions, (Zhiyong Li and Mike Thorland, SAS Institute Inc.) Provides a helpful high-level discussion of various topics related to the architecture, tuning, and security of the various web services in the SAS 9.4 middle tier.
• SAS1776-2015: Managing SAS® Web Infrastructure Platform Data Server High-Availability Clusters, (Ken Young, SAS Institute Inc.) A superb walkthrough of the various concepts and actions necessary to enabling high-availability capabilities in the SAS 9.4 Web Infrastructure Platform Data Server.

GENERAL PLATFORM AND STORAGE I/O

Every year we get updates to these venerable whitepapers that are very helpful in explaining how SAS interacts with platform technologies such as CPU architectures, operating systems, hard drives, flash drives, high-performance storage solution technologies, and much more.

• SAS1480-2015: How to Maintain Happy SAS® 9 Users, (Margaret Crevar, SAS Institute Inc.)
  Chock full of useful information to share with our customers, this paper discusses how SAS interacts with external platform components and offers guidance on configuration and deployment.
• SAS1501-2015: Best Practices for Configuring Your I/O Subsystem for SAS®9 Applications (Tony Brown and Margaret Crevar, SAS Institute Inc.)  An excellent technical resource specifically intended to share with customers and their storage engineering teams to ensure proper configuration and deployment of high-performing storage solutions in support of SAS.

SAS 9.4 GRID MANAGER

The SAS Grid Manager solution is a feature-rich and diverse technology set to help customers manage large workloads, improve infrastructure availability, increase resource utilization, and provide flexibility to the IT infrastructure – and oh yeah, deliver higher levels scalable performance for SAS solutions, too.

• SAS1968-2015: The Truth Behind the Most Common Myths for SAS Grid Manager (Margaret Crevar, Glenn Horton, and Doug Haigh, SAS Institute Inc.) SAS Grid Manager offers so many capabilities, it’s easy to get lost in it all. Important concepts are often poorly understood or sometimes forgotten. This paper pulls back the curtain on many of those topics, explaining that there’s no “magic” to it, just good technology we all need to comprehend.
• SAS1897-2015: Planning for the Worst—SAS® Grid Manager and Disaster Recovery (Glenn Horton and Doug Haigh, SAS Institute Inc.)  If you’re new to planning for disaster recovery, there might be a lot of questions you don’t know to ask. This paper defines many of the major concepts and addresses the considerations you need to make in light of a SAS Grid Manager solution.

CLOUD AND VIRTUALIZATION

SAS has big plans for pushing our analytic offerings to the cloud. Virtualization plays a major role in that effort.

• SAS1947-2015: SAS® vApps 101 (Danny Hamrick, Gary Kohan, Connie Robison, Rob Stephens, and Peter Villiers, SAS Institute Inc.)  SAS vApps (short for virtual applications) provide a way for us to deliver complete solution deployments which can range in size from a single software service all the way to multiple tier virtual machine implementations needing only minimal configuration to get up and running in a customer environment. This informative paper covers design objectives and decisions, technical and business benefits, as well as the lifecycle maintenance of SAS vApps.
• Paper 2882-2015: The Advantages and Pitfalls of Implementing SAS® in an Amazon Web Services Cloud Instance (Jeff Lehmann, Slalom Consulting, LLC)  A brief paper that nicely outlines the many benefits of deploying SAS software to cloud-hosting services like Amazon Web Services. It also touches on some of the disadvantages as well which are important to mitigate in any deployment.

▶ For more information about cloud, check out Erwan Granger’s excellent series of blog posts.