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.