Architecture of the SAS Intelligence Platform

Architecture Overview

The SAS Intelligence Platform architecture is designed to efficiently access large amounts of data, while simultaneously providing timely intelligence to a large number of users. The platform uses an n-tier architecture that enables you to distribute functionality across computer resources, so that each type of work is performed by the resources that are best suited to the job.

You can easily scale the architecture to meet the demands of your workload. For a large company, the tiers can be installed across a multitude of machines with different operating systems. For prototyping, demonstrations, or very small enterprises, all of the tiers can be installed on a single machine.

The architecture consists of the following four tiers:

Data sources

Data sources store your enterprise data. All of your existing data assets can be used, whether your data is stored in third-party database management systems, SAS tables, or enterprise resource planning (ERP) system tables.

SAS servers

SAS servers perform SAS processing on your enterprise data. Several types of SAS servers are available to handle different workload types and processing intensities. The software distributes processing loads among server resources so that multiple client requests for information can be met without delay.

Middle tier

The middle tier enables users to access intelligence data and functionality via a Web browser. This tier provides Web-based interfaces for report creation and information distribution, while passing analysis and processing requests to the SAS servers.

Clients

The client tier provides users with desktop access to intelligence data and functionality through easy-to-use interfaces. For most information consumers, reporting and analysis tasks can be performed with just a Web browser. For more advanced design and analysis tasks, SAS client software is installed on users' desktops.

Note: The four tiers listed above represent categories of software that perform similar types of computing tasks and require similar types of resources. The tiers do not necessarily represent separate computers or groups of computers.

The following diagram shows how the tiers interact, and the sections that follow describe each tier in more detail.

Architecture of the SAS Intelligence Platform

Architecture diagram showing the contents of the four tiers of the SAS Intelligence Platform

Data Sources

The SAS Intelligence Platform includes the following options for data storage:

SAS data sets, which are analogous to relational database tables.
SAS SPD Engine tables, which can be read or written by multiple threads.
SAS SPD Server, which is available as a separate product.
SAS OLAP cubes.
The SAS Framework Data Server, which is the default location for middle-tier data such as alerts, comments, and workflows, as well as data for the SAS Content Server and SAS Service Parts Optimization. The server is provided as an alternative to using a third-party DBMS. (The server cannot be used as a general-purpose data store.)

In addition, SAS provides products that enable you to access data in your existing third-party data stores and ERP systems. The SAS/ACCESS interfaces provide direct access to data stores such as the following:

Oracle
DB2
Teradata
ODBC
Microsoft SQL Server
Microsoft Excel spreadsheets
Sybase

For a complete list of supported data stores, go to http://support.sas.com/software/products/access/.

The following SAS Data Surveyor products provide direct access to ERP systems:

SAS Data Surveyor for SAP Plug-in for SAS Data Integration Studio enables you to consolidate and manage enterprise data from various SAP R/3 data sources.
SAS Data Surveyor for Clickstream Data is a plug-in to SAS Data Integration Studio. This plug-in enables you to create jobs that extract and transform clickstream data from Web logs, and then load the resulting data into a SAS table. Other applications, such as SAS Web Analytics, can then take the refined clickstream data and analyze it.
SAS has partnered with Composite Software to provide customers with access to ERP and customer relationship management (CRM) data. SAS data surveyors for Oracle Applications, Salesforce.com, and Siebel are available through this partnership.

For more information about data sources, see Data in the SAS Intelligence Platform.