Ronan,

Thanks for the feedback! Apologies for the internal-reference hyperlinks, we'll get those fixed asap.

The details of why Distributed SAS LASR Analytic Server is required to work with SASHDAT files is disguised in part behind the proprietary nature of the technology. However, page 3 of the HPAICG document does explain:

Some solutions, such as SAS Visual Analytics, rely on a SAS data store that is co-located with the SAS High-Performance Analytic environment on the analytics cluster. One option for this co-located data store is the SAS High-Performance Deployment for Hadoop. This is an Apache Hadoop distribution that is easily configured for use with the SAS High-Performance Analytics environment. It adds services to Apache Hadoop to write SASHDAT file blocks evenly across the HDFS filesystem. This even distribution provides a balanced workload across the machines in the cluster and enables SAS analytic processes to read SASHDAT tables at very impressive rates.
Alternatively, these SAS high-performance analytic solutions can use a pre-existing, supported Hadoop deployment or a Greenplum Data Computing Appliance.

I agree it's not super direct and clear on the matter. However, the takeaway here is to know that for the current release, SASHDAT files are only possible on HDFS hosts where LASR is deployed.