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SAS is the leader in analytics and Nutanix is the leader in invisible infrastructure.

Nutanix has thousands of customers and many of them already have SAS software running in their organization. They have experienced the benefits of invisible infrastructure and are moving more of their applications (including SAS) to Nutanix. It’s easy to deploy and manage SAS 9.4 and SAS Viya on Nutanix

Today, SAS 9.4 helps discover insights, manage data and make analytics approachable.

SAS 9.4 has been tested on Nutanix NX Models – both as a hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI), as well as using Nutanix as back-end storage only, for external hosts. Nutanix AHV clusters perform well in both scenarios.

SAS software makes great demands of IT infrastructure, so you must get the design right to ensure a successful deployment. Evaluating the SAS I/O requirements accurately is pivotal. Nutanix encourages involvement of Nutanix engineers to determine the back-end service requirements as well as optimal implementation model and sizing. Building the correct architecture is essential, but it’s not difficult if you follow the basic design rules laid out in this document:

  1. Meet or exceed the requirements set out in the design.

  2. Don’t back up or replicate SASWORK and SASUTIL for DR because they’re always local and temporary.

  3. Keep each SAS compute VM between 8 and 10 cores.

  4. Always test I/O performance.

Customers successfully running their SAS analytics on Nutanix have proven this methodology in the field.

Use this checklist to make sure you have considered all the key dimensions of your SAS design:

  • All storage is solid state (no HDD).

  • Each node has at least two 10 GbE adapters (25 GbE and 40 GbE adapters are even better).

  • Use an active-active load balancing method for the Ethernet ports.

  • Allocate only one I/O-heavy VM (for example, SAS 9.4 compute server, SPD server, CAS worker) per physical node.

  • I/O-heavy VMs have between 8 and 10 cores.

  • CVM has dedicated cores.

This document walks you through the best practices for deploying SAS 9.4 or SAS Viya on Nutanix: Running SAS on Nutanix

More about the SAS and NUTANIX integration: SAS Communities

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