SAS® Grid Manager Features

A managed, shared environment

  • Improves efficiency of program distribution and CPU utilization through dynamic, resource-based load balancing.
  • Makes computing resources available to multiple users and multiple applications for running larger or more complex analysis.
  • Provides job, queue, host and user management across your enterprise.
  • Enables job prioritization by rules-based job queues to govern the use of computing resources.
  • Provides automatic identification, allocation, management and optimization of computing resources and program flows.
  • Allows administrator to easily create a set of metadata-defined grid and SAS options to be applied automatically to workloads submitted to the grid based on the user's identity and the application being used (SAS® Enterprise Guide®, SAS® Enterprise Miner, etc.) to access the grid.
  • Simplifies administration of SAS environment through centralized policies.

High availability

  • Provides high-availability capabilities for critical SAS services, such as the SAS Metadata Server.
  • Uses a grid node as a hot-standby machine for failover and enables nondisruptive, rolling maintenance.
  • Detects hardware and software failures in the grid and recovers appropriately.
  • Ensures that SAS jobs will be completed optimally.
  • Restarts SAS jobs automatically from the last successful checkpoint when used with the SAS checkpoint/restart feature.

Grid-enabled SAS®

  • Automatically tailors SAS Data Integration Studio and SAS Enterprise Miner for parallel processing and job submission in a grid environment.
  • Balances the load of many SAS Enterprise Guide users through easy submission to the grid.
  • Provides load balancing for all SAS servers to improve throughput and response time of all SAS clients.
  • Uses SAS Code Analyzer to analyze job dependencies in SAS programs and generates grid-ready code:
    • Used by SAS Data Integration Studio and SAS Enterprise Guide to import SAS programs.
  • Provides automated session spawning and distributed processing of SAS programs across a set of diverse computing resources.
  • Speeds up processing of applicable SAS programs and applications, and provides more efficient computing resource utilization.
  • Enables scheduling of production SAS workflows to be executed across grid resources:
    • Provides a process flow diagram to create SAS flows of one or more SAS jobs that can be simple or complex to meet your needs.
    • Uses all of the policies and resources of the grid.
  • Enables many SAS solutions and user-written programs to be easily configured for submission to a grid of shared resources.
  • Integrates with all SAS Business Intelligence clients and analytics applications by storing grid-enabled code as SAS Stored Processes.
  • Provides greater resilience for mission-critical applications and high availability for the SAS environment.
  • Includes command-line batch submission utility called SASGSUB:
    • Allows you to submit and forget, and reconnect later to retrieve results.
    • Enables integration with other standard enterprise schedulers.
  • Enables batch submission to leverage checkpoint and automatically restart jobs.
  • Applies grid policies to SAS workspace servers when they are launched through the grid.

Real-time monitoring & administration

  • Provides a web-based tool for monitoring and administering multiple SAS grids, including:
    • Visuals for tracking resource usage, users and jobs running on the grid.
    • A GUI for modifying grid configurations and defining alerts when critical thresholds are crossed.
    • A GUI for configuring and managing critical services for high availability.
    • Support for filtering and role definitions for customizing displays and activities that can be performed.

Flexible infrastructure

  • Allows you to add computing resources incrementally to cost-effectively accommodate a growing number of users, as well as meet increased business needs.
  • Decouples the computing infrastructure from SAS applications to allow business users to focus on their processes.
  • Creates a shared environment for easily and dynamically allocating resources to meet peak needs of different business users over time.
  • Eases infrastructure maintenance needs by allowing machines to be taken offline without disrupting the business.
  • Improves price and performance through the use of commodity hardware.