Super-fast in-memory solution offers high performance, deep insights
CARY, NC, March 22, 2012 /CNW/ - A new in-memory business intelligence (BI) solution from SAS uses a highly visual interface to bring powerful analytics to a broader class of users than ever before. SAS® Visual Analytics, the newest product in the SAS High-Performance Analytics family from the leader in business analytics, provides a fast, simple and cost-effective path to business insight and better decisions.
With SAS Visual Analytics, organizations can:
- Apply the power of SAS analytics to massive amounts of data
- Visually explore data at the speed of sight
- Share fresh insights with everyone, everywhere, via the Web or iPad
SAS Visual Analytics combines the industry's leading analytics, unique in-memory architecture, intuitive data exploration, Hadoop support and information-delivery options including iPads®. It is the only in-memory engine designed specifically for business visualization of big data on inexpensive, non-proprietary hardware.
"The speed of in-memory architecture offers tremendous benefit. Organizations can explore huge data volumes and get answers to critical questions in near-real time," said Dan Vesset, Program Vice President of IDC's business analytics research. "SAS Visual Analytics offers a double bonus: the speed of in-memory analytics plus self-service eliminates the traditional wait for IT-generated reports. Businesses today must base decisions on insight gleaned from data, and that process needs to be close to instantaneous."
Beyond Business Intelligence
"SAS Visual Analytics helps business users to visually explore data on their own," said SAS CEO Jim Goodnight. "But it goes well beyond traditional query and reporting. Running on low-cost, industry-standard blade servers, its high-performance in-memory architecture delivers answers in seconds or minutes instead of hours or days.
"The core of SAS Visual Analytics - our innovative SAS LASR Analytic Server - speeds data exploration and visualization. This in-memory analytic engine will extend across our software product portfolio, seamlessly applying 35 years of SAS analytics innovation to big data assets," said Goodnight. "Add its publish-to-mobile capability and graphic visualization, and there's nothing that compares to SAS Visual Analytics."
SAS Visual Analytics can solve many business problems. For example, a marketing campaign manager at a retailer with hundreds of stores and a thriving online sales channel needs faster, more sophisticated next-best-offer recommendations for customers. SAS Visual Analytics allows analysts to look at all data from online sales, brick-and-mortar stores, external demographic information and social media activity. Entire populations can be analyzed to determine the best offer or interaction rather than using a sample, moving quickly and directly to robust, precise recommendations. This information can then be distributed easily.
Big data without limits
SAS Visual Analytics is tightly linked to Hadoop and includes an implementation of that open-source data architecture. Eliminating relational databases and their associated limits, SAS Visual Analytics is especially attractive when accuracy is critical in problem-solving across big data environments including both structured and unstructured data. For example, most relational database management systems (RDBMS) limit the number of columns to 1,000. SAS® LASR™ Analytic Server has no column limit and has been tested with more than 20,000 columns of data and more than 1 billion rows. The more data used in an analysis, the more accurate the results.
SAS Visual Analytics includes:
- SAS LASR Analytics Server. Clients communicate with SAS LASR Analytic Server for calculations on the data resident in memory, producing remarkably fast results.
- The Hub, a central location to launch the various elements of SAS Visual Analytics.
- Mobile, a tool to view reports, connect to servers and download information.
- Explorer, an ad hoc data discovery and visualization tool to explore and analyze data.
- Designer, used to create standard and custom reports and dashboards.
- Environment Administration, used by administrators to manage users, security and data.
Server components run on Red Hat or SUSE Linux, and the mobile client is available for the Apple® iPad® from the iTunes® store. Other mobile devices will be supported in the future.
While the high end is not limited, SAS LASR Analytic Server reference configurations begin with an eight-blade server with 96 processor cores, 768 gigabytes memory and 4.8 terabytes (TB) of disk storage. The upper end of the reference configurations is 96 blades with 1,152 cores, 9.2 TB memory and 57.6 TB of disk storage, enough disk to store the entire Library of Congress six times.
About SAS
SAS is the leader in business analytics software and services, and the largest independent vendor in the business intelligence market. Through innovative solutions, SAS helps customers at more than 55,000 sites improve performance and deliver value by making better decisions faster. Since 1976 SAS has been giving customers around the world THE POWER TO KNOW®.
SAS and all other SAS Institute Inc. product or service names are registered trademarks or trademarks of SAS Institute Inc. in the USA and other countries. ® indicates USA registration. Other brand and product names are trademarks of their respective companies. Copyright © 2012 SAS Institute Inc. All rights reserved.
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