A new in-memory business intelligence solution from SAS offers ahighly visual interface to bring analytics to a broader class ofusers. SAS Visual Analytics is the newest product in the SAShigh-performance analytics group.

With SAS Visual Analytics, organizations can:

• Apply SAS Analytics to massive amounts of data.
• Visually explore data at the speed of sight.
• Share fresh insights with everyone, everywhere, via the Web oriPad.

SAS Visual Analytics combines in-memory architecture, intuitivedata exploration, Hadoop support and information-delivery options,including the iPad. It is designed specifically for businessvisualization of big data on inexpensive, nonproprietaryhardware.

“The speed of in-memory architecture offers tremendous benefit.Organizations can explore huge data volumes and get answers tocritical questions in near-real time,” says Dan Vesset, programvice president of IDC's business analytics research. “SASVisual Analytics offers a double bonus: the speed of in-memoryanalytics plus self-service eliminates the traditional wait forIT-generated reports. Businesses today must base decisions oninsight gleaned from data, and that process needs to be close toinstantaneous.”

Beyond BI

“SAS Visual Analytics helps business users to visually exploredata on their own,” says SAS CEOJimGoodnight. “But it goes wellbeyond traditional query and reporting. Running on low-cost,industry-standard blade servers, its high-performance in-memoryarchitecture delivers answers in seconds or minutes instead ofhours or days.”

“The core of SAS Visual Analytics is the SAS LASR AnalyticServer, which speeds data exploration and visualization.

“This in-memory analytic engine will extend across our softwareproduct portfolio, seamlessly applying 35 years of SAS analyticsinnovation to big data assets,” says Goodnight.

A core component of SAS Visual Analytics, the SAS LASR AnalyticServer, uses Hadoop (embedded Hadoop Distributed File System) aslocal storage at the server for fault tolerance.

The more data used in an analysis, the more accurate theresults. This is especially attractive when accuracy is critical inproblem solving across big data environments, including bothstructured and unstructured data.

SAS Visual Analytics includes:

• SAS LASR Analytic Server—clients communicate with SAS LASRAnalytic Server for calculations on the data resident in-memory,producing remarkably fast results.
• The Hub—a central location to launch the various elements ofSAS Visual Analytics.
• Mobile—a tool for viewing reports, connecting to servers anddownloading information on the go.
• Explorer—an ad hoc data discovery and visualization tool toexplore and analyze data.
• Designer—used to createstandard and custom reports anddashboards.
• Environment Administration—used by administrators to manageusers, security and data.

Server components run on Red Hat or SUSE Linux, and the mobileclient is available for the iPad from the iTunes App Store. Othermobile devices will be supported in the future.

While the high end is not limited, SAS LASR Analytic Serverreference configurations begin with an eight-blade server with 96processor cores, 768 gigabytes memory and 4.8 terabytes (TB) ofdisk storage. The upper end of the reference configurations is 96blades with 1,152 cores, 9.2 TB memory and 57.6 TB of diskstorage.