The SAS LASR Analytic Server
is an analytic platform that provides a secure, multi-user environment
for concurrent access to data that is loaded into memory. The server
can take advantage of a distributed computing environment by distributing
data and the workload among multiple machines and performing massively
parallel processing. The server can also be deployed on a single machine
where the workload and data volumes do not demand a distributed computing
environment.
The server handles both
big data and smaller sets of data, and it is designed with a high-performance,
multi-threaded, analytic code. The server processes client requests
at extraordinarily high speeds due to the combination of hardware
and software that is designed for rapid access to tables in memory.
By loading tables into memory for analytic processing, the SAS LASR Analytic Server
enables business analysts to explore data and discover relationships
in data at the speed of RAM.
The architecture was
originally designed for optimal performance in a distributed computing
environment. A distributed SAS LASR Analytic Server runs on
multiple machines. A typical distributed configuration is to use a
series of blades as a cluster. Each blade contains both local storage
and large amounts of memory. In this analytic environment, many gigabytes
of RAM per blade is common. Local storage is used to store large data
sets in distributed form. Data is loaded into memory and made available
so that clients can quickly access that data.
For distributed deployments,
having local storage available on machines is critical in order to
store large data sets in a distributed form. The SAS LASR Analytic Server
supports the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) as a co-located
data provider. HDFS is used because the server can read from and write
to HDFS in parallel. In addition, HDFS provides replication for data
redundancy. HDFS stores data as blocks in distributed form on the
blades and the replication provides failover capabilities.
In
a distributed deployment, the server also supports some third-party
vendor databases as co-located data providers. Teradata Data Warehouse
Appliance and Greenplum Data Computing Appliance are massively parallel
processing database appliances. You can install the SAS LASR Analytic Server
software on each of the machines in either appliance. The server can
read in parallel from the local data on each machine.
For the SAS LASR Analytic Server
1.6 release (concurrent with the SAS Visual Analytics 6.1 release)
the server supports a non-distributed deployment. A non-distributed SAS LASR Analytic Server
can perform the same in-memory analytic operations as a distributed
deployment server. A non-distributed deployment does not support SAS
High-Performance Deployment of Hadoop or third-party vendor appliances
as co-located data providers.