SAS 9.2 Business Analytics Framework and IBM PowerVM Virtualization Deployment Scenarios

Over the past several years, virtualization has been a hot topic of much discussion by IT personnel as a way to reduce cost, improve utilization and responsiveness, and increase flexibility. Although server consolidation still remains the primary reason for using virtualization, application isolation and continuity are also discussed as other uses. This paper presents three use cases for deploying SAS® Business Analytics Framework on IBM virtual environments when running on a POWER6 server. The information provided can serve as a guide for IT personnel in choosing the best virtual environment for their customer needs. INTRODUCTION Transforming and analyzing data to provide proactive, evidence-based decision strategies have become increasingly important in today’s highly competitive environment. Increased demand for business analytics that are designed to navigate through large amounts of data in the fastest time possible provides companies with a truly competitive advantage. The SAS Business Analytics Framework (Release 9.2) for IBM® AIX 6 on POWERTM processor-based systems provides such solutions. The unmatched expertise of IBM in hardware and software technology and services enables the SAS Business Analytics Framework to be deployed on an infrastructure that is designed to improve reliability, performance and scalability. Although business decision makers deal with mission-critical issues, their IT organizations find ways to improve hardware resource utilization, responsiveness and flexibility while maintaining performance and scalability. One way that IT organizations are doing this is through the use of virtualization technologies. A 2008 Gartner study states that virtualization will be the highest impact trend in changing IT infrastructure and operations through 2012. Today, the desire to increase server utilization and lower total cost of ownership through server consolidation are the main driving forces behind the increasing use of virtualization. However, there are other reasons why an IT shop might choose to use more advanced virtualization technologies -such as application isolation and business continuity, both of which are explained in this paper. The paper presents three use cases that are common to a typical IT shop: the need to consolidate servers, isolate applications and provide business continuity. The use cases provide a way to demonstrate how IT personnel can use IBM PowerVMTM technology to improve resource utilization while maintaining service levels, performance and scalability of their SAS applications. Each use case shows the impact of virtualization on SAS applications and provides guidance on how to best use different virtualization features that PowerVM technology offers. THE TEST SUITE AND TEST ENVIRONMENT In testing the IBM virtual environments, a SAS Business Analytics Framework was set up to run data integration, mixed workload analytics and enterprise business intelligence workloads. Error! Reference source not found. shows the high-level diagram of the test environment. Systems Architecture SAS Global Forum 2010