Ever wanted to test out the latest SAS® technology on your own data, but lacked the time or administrative backing of IT to make that happen? Ever wanted to test drive Hadoop with your own data and SAS® but are lacking the support or skills to do that? If I piqued your interest, let me take a moment and introduce you to the Analytics Fast Track™ for SAS®. This portable Proof of Concept (POC) solution has all of the latest SAS® technology installed and already configured for your use. You no longer need to worry about exporting your snippets of data and sending them to SAS®, instead, we send the software, hardware and experts to you.
Worried about actually loading the data and administering the box? You don't need to worry about that either. Part of the Analytics Fast Track™ for SAS® POC is having a SAS team accompany it. The SAS® team will help ensure the success of your POC and make sure there are no administrative issues to worry about or slow you down. You will work with your SAS® account team to set the expectations and success criteria for your POC before we even come on site. This way you will have a more focused timeline and have more time and energy to explore and innovate with these new SAS® technologies. Typical POC's completed in this manner have taken less than a week to complete. That’s right - days, not months, to realize the value of SAS®. Not too bad being able to see some ROI before you even have to spend anything. Yes, you read that correctly as well, no cost to you.
This POC solution has been put together with a number of solutions installed and configured. Everything from High Performance Analytics and Grid, to Visual Analytics and Visual Statistics, to Enterprise Miner and Event Stream Processing. The hardware even has a 4 node Hadoop cluster of Cloudera or Hortonworks distributions (MapR is in the works). Current hardware configurations are Intel®Xeon®E7v3 CPU's (72 Cores) with 3TB of RAM and 20-30TB of SSD's. We can easily lift 1TB of data in memory when working with any of our in-memory technologies.
Here is a snippet of video from SAS® Global Forum 2016 where one of the Analytics Fast Track™ for SAS® POC was being shown.
I was able to catch up with Pat Richards at Intel recently, and the topic of the Analytics Fast Track™ for SAS® came up. I wanted to share a couple of his responses in regards to this environment:
- How does the combined solution of SAS analytics and the E7 enhance the ability for customers to make informed decisions to improve their strategies and deliver timely results?
Today’s data environment is bringing new challenges to analytics. The combination of vastly increasing volumes of data and changing business conditions that drive the need for rapid response are stressing traditional approaches to Analytics.
Fortunately the combination of Intel’s E7 processing capabilities (96* cores) and the ability to address much greater amounts of RAM (12 TB*) along with SAS’s advanced analytic software allow companies to perform analytics that were impractical till now. The result is the ability to drive business objectives forward in a timely and cost effective manner.
- How is the AFT with Intel Xeon E7 v4 processor-powered servers, enabling IT staff to rapidly deliver SAS capabilities without compromising their governance?
The AFT delivers compute and IO capacity that previously took two or more racks of equipment in a single 4U unit. Standing up one machine rather than 2 racks of machines greatly simplifies operations and networking requirements. Not only does the AFT delivery massive compute capacity it also can move data at nearly 18 GB/s. And of course it does this while having the built in security and exception features Intel imbeds in their Enterprise chips.
*Based on the AFT configuration
If you are interested in learning more and would like to see one of these POC servers live and in person, come to the Analytics Experience at the Bellagio in Las Vegas, September 12 - 14th. You can see firsthand how portable and easy to use this program is. There will be experts on hand to answer any of your questions. You can also contact your SAS account executive to get a more detailed overview of the Analytics Fast Track™ for SAS® solution and find out if it is right for you and your POC.
1 Comment
This is very interesting; the classic problem in business is that you have to prove the ROI before you can get the budget to install. And once you've installed, you have merely taken step 1 of many to prove the ROI.