SAS 9.4 M3 released in July 2015 with some interesting new features and functionality for platform SAS administrators.  In this blog I will review at a very high level the major new features. For details you can see the SAS 9.4 System Administration guide.

SAS 9.4 M3 includes a new release of SAS Environment Manager (2.5), and some nice new features.

Some highlights include: A federated data mart enables you to collect metric data in data marts for several SAS deployments and view the collected metric data in one place, log collection and discovery has been improved and support has been added for collecting metric data from a SAS grid. For details on these and a few additional enhancements to SAS Environment Manager see the SAS Environment Manager Users Guide.

The SAS Administration interface available in SAS Environment Manager is now an HTML5 interface and includes new metadata management capabilities including:

• Server manager module which enables you to manage server definitions in metadata. For the current release, you can browse any type of server that has been defined in SAS metadata. You can create and edit definitions for SAS LASR Analytic Servers
• Library manager module enables you to manage SAS library definitions in metadata. For the current release, you can browse any type of library that has been defined in SAS metadata. You can create and edit definitions for Base SAS libraries and SAS LASR Analytic Server libraries.
• SAS Backup Manager graphical user interface (more on that later).

For details of the new metadata management features see the SAS(R) Environment Manager 2.5 Administration: User’s Guide.

In support of Metadata Server clustering a new a new feature has been added to the Metadata Analyze and Repair Tools. Metadata Server Cluster Synchronization verifies that metadata is synchronized among all the nodes of a metadata server cluster.

The SAS Deployment Backup and Recovery tool has a number of new features. An exciting one is a new interface available on the Administration tab of SAS Environment Manager. The new interface supports scheduling, configuring, monitoring, and performing integrated backups. The interface incorporates most of the functions of the Deployment Backup and Recovery tool’s batch commands. For details of the using the new user interface see the SAS(R) Environment Manager 2.5 Administration: User’s Guide.

In addition to the new user interface, the tool has some additional enhancements. You can now:

• include or exclude specific tiers, specific instances of the SAS Web Infrastructure Platform Data Server, or particular databases
• reorganize metadata repositories during a backup
• define filters that specify which subdirectories and files are to be included or excluded when backing up sub-directories within the configuration directory
• specify additional (custom) directories within the configuration directory to be backed up.

Click here for more information on SAS Deployment Backup and Recovery tool.

When promoting content in 9.4 M3 you can use the -disableX11 option to run the batch import or export tool on UNIX without setting the DISPLAY variable. This removes a dependency on X11 for the batch export and import tools.

That is a really high level review of new features for platform administrators in SAS 9.4 M3. I hope you found this post helpful.