Margaret Crevar has worked at SAS since May 1982. She has held a variety of positions since then, working in sales, marketing and now research and development. In her current role, Crevar manages the SAS Performance Lab in R&D. This lab has two roles: testing future SAS releases while they're still in development to make sure they're performing as expected; and helping SAS customers who are experiencing performance issues overcome their challenges.
Here in the SAS Performance Lab, we’re seeing more and more SAS sites moving their SAS® 9 application workloads to Windows Server 2012. Now that we’ve had sufficient time to gather feedback from early implementers of SAS on these systems, we thought you might want a recap of some of
Starting with SAS 9.4, not only will SAS administrators see lots of processes running on your operating system supporting the various SAS servers (such as SAS Metadata server), you will also see two new processes that have a description of “agent” running. Agents are software processes responsible for tasks such
This is a continuing topic of the SAS Administration and Performance blog series. In the last edition, I discussed why you need to do a technical assessment prior to planning your SAS deployment. Yes, this step takes time, but you’ll find it far easier to implement the suggested tuning guidelines
"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
With the popularity of SAS Grid Manager, this question often comes up: which clustered or shared file system should we use with the multiple nodes of the SAS Grid? This is a question that needs to be thought through very carefully because the amount of time and effort to fix
Users often ask if there are any major tuning efforts that need to be made in order for SAS to execute ideally in a virtual environment. The quick answer is "not really". The longer answer is “it helps to set up your virtual environment properly.” There are a few minor
This question comes up often when we’re working with SAS customers to configure their underlying storage arrays: “When is solid-state storage appropriate for SAS applications?” Solid-state drives, or SSDs, are the latest and greatest thing in storage today because they boast extremely fast performance. In this post, I’ll outline how
SAS software benefits from the high performance of solid state drives (SSD), whether it is in the form of flash memory cards or hard-drive form-factor SSDs. The following general points should be considered when planning SSD storage for SAS usage:
One of the roles my team enjoys is working with SAS customers on performance issues along with testing SAS software on selected hardware configurations. We also work closely with other groups within SAS who work with SAS partners to test the latest and greatest features. My team then takes what
Thanks for reading my previous post about the importance of understanding your performance issues before trying to determine the cause. Compiling all the available information about the problem and finding a repeatable SAS process that can be monitored are the first steps toward fixing the issue. Since we now have
