SAS is a popular application for gaining insights into your data and making intelligent business decisions. Deploying SAS on Azure instances adds more flexibility, as it is no longer necessary to dedicate physical hardware to running the SAS Grid components. You gain the flexibility of being able to change availability zones or scale out the various components as necessary. However, SAS performance in Azure may not provide the response time that your systems need or that your executives want.
This is where Veritas Alta Shared Storage can help. It can improve the performance of SAS running on Azure by scaling storage performance just as easily as SAS Grid scales out service delivery components. Need more users to have access? Add a Grid node. Need more storage? Add disks or a Veritas Alta Shared Storage node. Need additional resiliency? Configure SAS and Veritas Alta Shared Storage to cross Azure availability zone boundaries. It really is that easy!
SAS recently did some testing, using a six-node Veritas Alta Shared Storage storage cluster leveraging our Cluster File System (CFS) and Flexible Storage Sharing (FSS) capabilities. This allowed the creation of a single shared file system between all six nodes using cloud-native block storage services. FSS leverages the storage directly attached to each Azure VM to build out that shared file system.
The storage from this CFS cluster delivered the performance that SAS Grid needed to provide effective results--faster than the competition. In fact, Veritas Alta Shared Storage outperformed competing solutions by 60%! This means that you get your business results that much faster than if you were running on storage from another vendor. In addition, our solution needed only those six nodes to deliver the storage needs, while some other vendors required eight or more nodes to deliver the same performance.
But Veritas Alta Shared Storage delivers more than just scalable and performant storage – we can migrate that data easily between availability zones and nodes in Azure, and we can move or copy data between Azure and your on-premises storage arrays or even another cloud provider, helping you avoid vendor lock-in. A recent study by ESG shows that 89% of companies deploying cloud-native applications use multiple cloud platforms, with 42% using 4 or more different platforms. Having the freedom to move your applications and data between those cloud platforms is one of the things that makes Veritas Alta Shared Storage so important. It can also be used to provide up-to-date copies of your data for off-host processing--including ransomware protection, backups, virus scanning, and data warehousing.
Veritas Alta Shared Storage is a great addition to your SAS Grid deployment, be it on-premises or in any of the current cloud offerings that you choose, especially if you're looking at migrations between platforms in your future.
For more information on best practices for SAS on Azure, check out the information here from SAS. For additional information on Veritas Alta Shared Storage’s Cluster File System (CFS) with SAS Grid on Azure, check out the information here.
For more information on Veritas Alta Shared Storage, click here.
