This is my second blog on the topic of anonymization, which I’ve spent some time over the past several months researching. My first blog, Anonymization for data managers, focused on the technical process. Now let’s dive into the role for analysts, report designers and information owners. To analysts and reporting
I’ve spent some time over the past couple of months learning more about anonymization. This began with an interest in the technical methods used to protect sensitive personally-identifiable information in a SAS data warehouse and analytics platform we delivered for a customer. But I learned that anonymization has two rather different meanings; one in the
Recent updates to SAS 9.4 have introduced some nice improvements in support of automated migration using the SAS Migration Utility and SAS Deployment Wizard. SAS has been working hard to make the migration experience more user friendly and less error prone. Changes have focused on making errors easier to identify
Hadoop has been called a game changer technology. Here’s why: - DATA IS DIFFERENT: We now have to deal with both structured and unstructured data. - NO LIMITS: We now deal with Terabyte or Petabyte data size and not just with old Megabyte. - COMPLEXITY: We work with complex multi-server
If you have your SAS Certified Platform Administrator Credential, then it’s clear that you’ve studied a lot to achieve it. But suddenly the Hadoop era shows up and what you find are big gaps in your skills inventory. SAS administrators must be familiar with all the data SAS platform can
SAS offers a rich collection of features for working with Hadoop quickly and efficiently. This post will provide a brief run-through of the various technologies used by SAS to get to data in Hadoop and what’s needed to get the job done. Working with text files Base SAS software has the
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
SAS recently performed testing using the Intel Cloud Edition for Lustre* Software - Global Support (HVM) available on AWS marketplace to determine how well a standard workload mix using SAS Grid Manager performs on AWS. Our testing demonstrates that with the right design choices you can run demanding compute and
SAS System software supports a wide variety architecture and deployment possibilities. It’s wild when you think about it because you can scale the analytic power of SAS from the humblest single CPU laptop machine all the way up to hundreds-of-machines clusters. When SAS deployments involve many machines, it’s natural to
Editor's note (1/13/16): This post has been updated with full paper presentations from SAS Global Forum 2015. Enjoy! This year, the number of presentations, Super Demos and workshops to help with the administration of SAS software and its hardware infrastructure is growing at SAS Global Forum 2015. This is wonderful news to
SAS FULLSTIMER is a SAS system option that takes operating system information that is being collected by SAS process runs and writes that information to the SAS log. Using it can add up to 10 lines additional lines to your SAS log for each SAS step in your SAS log—so why
My Performance Validation team in SAS R&D is constantly working with our partners to test how their storage arrays work with SAS. In late 2014, we finalized several papers that discuss how a mixed analytics workload performs on several storage arrays. While doing this testing, we also listed lessons-learned in
Many larger SAS deployments have multiple instances of similar SAS-related servers. For example, a distributed SAS Enterprise BI environment may have several machines running instances of the object spawner or the OLAP server. Similarly, all of your distributed SAS Visual Analytics deployments have worker nodes that are typically dedicated Linux
When designing a SAS Grid Manager architecture, there is a requirement that has always been a critical component: a clustered file system. Over the years, vendors have released versions of these systems that are more robust and SAS has increased the minimum IO requirements, but the basic design has never changed—until now.
With the growing use of SAS on commodity hardware, many organizations are running lots of SAS servers on separate instances of operating system in a SAS infrastructure. This configuration is great for optimizing resources, but when these SAS servers have to share data, then SAS recommends the use of a clustered
In researching material for an upcoming project, I investigated the SAS Deployment Backup and Recovery Tool available in SAS 9.4. Here are some of my findings on identifying what directories are included in a Backup and Recovery session and how to add custom directories to a backup configuration. The SAS
As SAS administrators, I know you are as excited as I am by the ability of SAS Environment Manager to monitor, in detail, the performance of their SAS environments. Now, we have a robust tool to monitor, measure and report on the performance of the various SAS components. An added
In trying to offer better support to SAS users, many customers’ IT departments are looking to consolidate all their SAS desktop users onto a centralized Windows, UNIX or Linux server. This option is a very practical strategy, but implementing it satisfactorily requires a lot of assessment on how the SAS
Several new capabilities and components are available in SAS Environment Manager 2.4, the web-based administration solution for a SAS environment. For me, the most important enhancement is probably the SAS Environment Manager Service Management Architecture Framework, which provides features and functions that enable SAS Environment Manager to fit into a
During a migration to a new release of SAS software, the SAS Migration Utility is used to analyze and package your source software. There are two ways that you can get the SAS Migration Utility. It’s available by selecting SAS Migration Utility from the Downloads page on support.sas.com. The SAS Migration
Did you know that applying a new SAS license file for many SAS solutions is a two step process? Because many of SAS’ most of popular solutions (including SAS® Visual Analytics, SAS® Enterprise MinerTM and SAS® Customer Intelligence) depend on the middle-tier architecture for primary user access, information about licensed
If someone asks you whether SAS runs in the cloud, there are exactly two wrong answers: "yes" and "no". Instead, this question should spark a discussion. It should be a discussion about which of the five characteristics of cloud computing they are interested in. The answers will point you in
For those of you who have followed my SAS Administration blogs, you will know that setting up your IO subsystem (the entire infrastructure from the network/fibre channels in your physical server, across your connections, to the fibre adapters into the storage array, and finally to the physical disk drives in
While previous SAS releases provided high availability through custom-designed failover techniques, many customers requested more robust failover or cluster support for high availability. The SAS 9.4 Metadata Server cluster was introduced to help address this need. A SAS Metadata Server cluster is a coordinated set of metadata servers that act
Perhaps it is my astrological sign, but as a Gemini, I seem to be cursed blessed with a duality that consists of balancing my creative side with exacting nature of my logical side. In my personal life, I enjoy woodworking. Whether it is creating “art in the round” from a
If you’ve used SAS Environment Manager, you know what kind of information it’s capable of providing – the metrics that show you how the resources in your SAS environment are performing. But what if it could do more? What if it could automatically collect and standardize metric data from SAS
In this post we dig deeper into the fourth recommended practice for securing the SAS-Hadoop environment through Kerberos authentication: When configuring SAS and Hadoop jointly in a high-performance environment, ensure that all SAS servers are recognized by Kerberos. Before explaining the complex steps in connecting to secure Hadoop within a
The only thing that’s constant is change. The continual cycle of computing changes leads to common questions about the effects of these changes—operating systems are getting upgraded, customers are moving to new SAS clients, upgrading to new releases of SAS, working with new Java and browser versions. All of these
In previous posts, we’ve shared the importance of understanding the fundamentals of Kerberos authentication and how we can simplify processes by placing SAS and Hadoop in the same realm. For SAS applications to interact with a secure Hadoop environment, we must address the third key practice: Ensure Kerberos prerequisites are met
When SAS is used for analysis on large volumes of data (in the gigabytes), SAS reads and writes the data using large block sequential IO. To gain the optimal performance from the hardware when doing these IOs, we strongly suggest that you review the information below to ensure that the
