Sunz2010 Bill Gibson Managing Sas Environment

Copyright © 2006, SAS Institute Inc. All rights reserved.

Considerations in Managing your SAS EnvironmentSUNZ 201016 February 2010

Bill GibsonCTO, SAS ANZ

Agenda

� What environments (Dev/Test/Prod, Discovery & Operational, Business Continuity) should you have?

� Administration – daily, weekly and periodic tasks


� Administration – daily, weekly and periodic tasks

• Back-ups

• Monitoring your environment

• Software Maintenance

� User Support

� Trouble shooting and working with SAS Support

Environment Types

� Development

� Test

� Production

� Software Test


� Software Test

� Playpen

� UAT

� BAU Dev/Test

� Discovery

� Operational

� Business Continuity/DR

Software Environments - Single Environment

� Simple and cheap to set up and manage.

� Risks around business continuity if issues arise.

� Risk of breaking system by


� Risk of breaking system by

• Runaway usage

• Incorrect maintenance application

• Hardware error

� Need to evaluate time to recover from an outage, and the business impact.

Dev / Test / Prod in Business Analytics

� Very different from traditional operational systems

� IT use Dev/Test for data management & production system creation & maintenance.

� Business users create new content (reports,


� Business users create new content (reports, analyses, & ad-hoc data management) in production environment as required.

• May use folder level security to manage status.

� Multiple “applications” hosted on a single platform.(see http://www2.sas.com/proceedings/forum2007/204-2007.pdf)

Discovery & Operational Environments


Complex Enterprise Wide Architecture


Sample Complex Configuration- Detail

� Active/passive Metadata

� Clustered Mid Tier


Tier

� Grid enabled compute Tier

SAS Administration

� Requires competency around both operating system and SAS (+ people skills)

� Not necessarily a full time role


� SAS Platform Administration Training mandatory

� Focus should be on preventing problems, not fixing them

� Critical to have a SAS Administration role with suitable competencies.

(Ref: The Many Hats of the SAS® Administrator

Administration – Back-ups (daily)

� Metadata Server Backups are essential.

• Operating system back-ups cannot back-up a running metadata server successfully. It must be paused.

• Make sure the SAS back-up is archived to a separate


• Make sure the SAS back-up is archived to a separate location.

• SAS Standard install provides 31 day rolling back-ups.

� Back-up Content Server /Table Server at the same time as metadata

� Back-up SAS Config directory tree before/after each config change

Best Practices for Backing Up and Restoring Your System Best Practices for Backing Up Your SAS System


Tip: Create Admin Metadata “Playpen” Server

� Selective Restore of Archived Metadata Versions

• Restore production metadata back up to playpen ia file copies

• Selectively export content


• Selectively export content

• Import required objects back to production environment

� Does not require a complete environment, just a metadata server which can be started as needed

Monitoring Your Environment

� Disk Space

• Regular cleanup of orphaned work libraries

• Out-of-space is a major cause of production job failure

• Monitor space during overnight batch processing


• Monitor space during overnight batch processing

� System Resources

• CPU

• Memory

• I/O performance

Windows I/O and Memory Management

� Generally poorly understood.

� I/O is typically a bottleneck with multi-GB files –and I/O by default goes through Windows file cache.


cache.

� Look at SGIO (which avoids cache) – use Bufno=n000

� Understand Windows Memory management:

� http://blogs.msdn.com/ntdebugging/archive/2007/10/10/the-memory-shell-game.aspx

SAS 9.2 and the SAS Administrator

� Major advances in System Administration in 9.2

• Attend the changes in Platform Administration training

• Browse the What’s New

• Try the new features out!


• Try the new features out!

SAS® 9.2 Audit and Performance Measurement� SAS Metadata Server Audit Reporting

• Administrative authorization and authentication modifications

• Administrative group and userid access control modifications

• Userid authentication and authorization patterns

• Userid authentication and password failure attempts

� SAS Enterprise BI Server analytic server performance usage


� SAS Enterprise BI Server analytic server performance usage

• Metadata Library Reporting

• PROC and DATA library reports

• SAS OLAP Server Cube usage

• SAS Stored Process Server usage and user reporting

• SAS analytic server processor utilization reports

� SAS Enterprise BI Environment Status Reports,

• Web application server and services availability

• Analytic server tier availability

• Analytic server tier response time reporting

• Real-time alert feature for failure state conditions

Software Maintenance

� Generally proactive, scheduled maintenance is recommended.

� For 9.2, install maintenance releases in a scheduled maintenance outage.


scheduled maintenance outage.

� If you do this you probably do not need to apply pro-active hot fixes as well.

� Hot fixes are generally only available at the current maintenance release level.

� Details at support.sas.com- search “Maintenance Release”

User Management –Real Life Examples

� 6TB of data in SAS Data Sets

� 30,000 SAS programs

– no understanding of who created what, when, and what


– no understanding of who created what, when, and what is obsolete.

� User program that uses 400GB of work space, whole system slows down when it runs.(some tuning reduced space required by 95%)

Suggestions for Managing Users

� Create, communicate and “enforce” Best Practices

• Define standard directory / metadata trees

� Provide avenues for knowledge sharing


� Provide avenues for knowledge sharing

• Web site

• User forums

• Mail lists

Publicise successes

� Business Intelligence Competency Centre Concept

- see SAS Web Site

Enterprise Guide

� Standard Locations for Projects

� Versioning Strategy

� Project Size & Complexity


� Project Size & Complexity

• Don’t put everything in one project

• Separate Data Preparation from Analysis & Reporting

� Understand How EG interacts with 3rd party databases

DI Studio

� Standard Metadata Structure

� Meaningful Names

• Temp Tables


• Process Objects

� Create sensible size jobs

• Consider restartability

Example


Trouble Shooting & Working with SAS Tech Support

1. Learn to use Support.sas.com

2. Plan and test remote access for support (WebEX)

3. Provide complete logs, not just extracts


3. Provide complete logs, not just extracts

• Learn how to create diagnostic logs and set logging levels

4. Single error messages and screenshots of limited use.

5. Provide information on “What is” and “What is not”.

Conclusions

� A well managed SAS environment is a productivity aid for all users

� Administrators need to have blend of IT & SAS skills


skills

� Monitoring your environments allows issues to be anticipated, and avoided.

� Appropriate standards, well communicated & monitored, facilitate development and maintenance.

Questions & Feedback


References

The Many Hats of the SAS® AdministratorFabian Robinson, Shiva SrinivasanPJM Interconnection, Norristown, PA

SAS Global Forum 2009 177-2009


Optimizing SQL performance with SAS Enterprise Guide®

Best practice paper

SAS and Teradata Center of Excellence

Sunz2010 Bill Gibson Managing Sas Environment

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