There are several signs that your SAS environment needs SAND CDBMS Nearline for SAS. In my experience, these are the 5 most common:

###1. Extreme data.

When the size of your SAS environment is starting to grow, it’s a sign you need SAND CDBMS Nearline. Data growth can creep up on you — even a terabyte of SAS data, once it’s indexed and prepared for analytic use, can balloon up by a factor of 3. If that data is replicated in production, development, and backup environments, it could be 9 times the original size before you roll it out. And when that original size grows to 2 terabytes, 5 terabytes, 10 terabytes, and beyond…? As I wrote in my last blog post, storage is getting cheaper but bandwidth isn’t. Moving around multiple terabytes isn’t cheap. SAND CDMBS Nearline for SAS has reduced our customers’ multi-terabyte environment down to gigabytes — 98% compression. Like any diet, however, it’s much easier to get control early on than to try and deal with it after it’s become a huge problem. Putting SAND CDBMS Nearline for SAS in place lets you keep massive amounts of data instantly accessible, in a small footprint, and gain all the extra benefits of agility and flexibility that come with it.

###2. Big ETL

When you have issues with ETL processes, or you want to enhance the value of data by adding elements like demographic information, it’s a sign you need SAND CDBMS Nearline for SAS. With web log analytics for example, we’ve seen performance improvements that took the ETL process down from 24 hours to 30 minutes. And this is fully scalable. So if making batch windows and meeting SLA agreements are important — and we know from our customers that they are — SAND CDBMS Nearline for SAS provides significant additional value.

###3. Big analytics.

When you need to get the most productivity possible out of your SAS analysts, it’s a sign you need SAND CDBMS Nearline. One of the benefits of SAND CDBMS Nearline for SAS is that the smaller footprint greatly improves I/O performance, which significantly improves the overall performance of the SAS environment. Query speeds also benefit — we’ve seen real world speed boosts of over 7 times and productivity increases of over 3 times. In addition to that, eliminating the need for ever-increasing indexing projects and removing ongoing data-preparation delays, lets your hard-to-find, harder-to-train analysts spend their time doing analysis. Your analysts get access to more data, so they can shop for it when they want, and slice away at it how they want.

###4. Big change.

When you are dealing with new projects, new customers, mergers and acquisitions — anytime you want to integrate more data from different data sources, — it’s a sign you need SAND CDBMS Nearline for SAS. Not only can SAND CDBMS Nearline connect to almost any data source, it can run on Windows, Linux, or Unix, so it’s platform-agnostic and can fit into any architecture, be it legacy, inherited, or newly acquired. And because SAND data is stored in read-only format, your original data remains intact in compliance with corporate policy or government regulation. Analysts know the data they’re working on is the same data that was brought into the system. SAND also manages the Information Lifecycle Management (ILM), so specific pieces of information can be kept live in the online system for a pre-defined period of time and then automatically brought into SAND CDBMS Nearline.

###5. Big updates.

When you migrate to a new version of SAS and need to re-open SAS data sets to do a conversion, it’s a sign you need SAND CDBMS Nearline. A powerful tool to simplify the process, once SAS data is moved to nearline, the resulting reduction in the footprint of the SAS environment (up to 98%) means a quicker and more efficient migration. Afterwards, data stored in SAND CDBMS Nearline for SAS remains just as accessible as it was before.

###One more thing…

In my last blog post I talked about some of this as it pertains to one of our customers, dunnhumby, who handles retail analytics for over 350 million retail customers on behalf of companies like Tesco, Home Depot, and Kroger. In my next blog post I’ll tackle the final piece of our SAND CDBMS Nearline for SAS offering — result sets.