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Shared File Systems : Determining the Best Choice for your Distributed SAS ® Foundation Applications
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Crevar, Margaret A. |
| Copyright Year | 2017 |
| Abstract | If you are planning on deploying SAS® Grid Manager and SAS® Enterprise BI (or other distributed SAS® Foundation applications) with load balanced servers on multiple operating systems instances, , a shared file system is required. In order to determine the best shared file system choice for a given deployment, it is important to understand how the file system is used, the SAS® I/O workload characteristics performed on it, and the stressors that SAS Foundation applications produce on the file system. For the purposes of this paper, we use the term "shared file system" to mean both a clustered file system and shared file system, even though" shared" can denote a network file system and a distributed file system – not clustered. INTRODUCTION This paper examines the shared file systems that are most commonly used with SAS and reviews their strengths and weaknesses. SAS GRID COMPUTING REQUIREMENTS FOR SHARED FILE SYSTEMS Before we get into the reasons why a shared file system is needed for SAS® Grid Computing, let’s briefly discuss the SAS I/O characteristics. GENERAL SAS I/O CHARACTERISTICS SAS Foundation creates a high volume of predominately large-block, sequential access I/O, generally at block sizes of 64K, 128K, or 256K, and the interactions with data storage are significantly different from typical interactive applications and RDBMSs. Here are some major points to understand (more details about the bullets below can be found in this paper): SAS tends to perform large sequential Reads and Writes. SAS does not pre-allocate storage when initializing or when performing Writes to a file. Reading and writing of data is done via the operating system’s (OS) file cache. A large number of temporary files can be created during long-running SAS jobs in SAS temporary file space referred to as SAS WORK. SAS creates standard operating system (OS) files for its data store. When executing Writes, there is a single writer thread per SAS session. There are some portions of the SAS software portfolio that can render IOPs oriented activity: Heavily indexed files traversed randomly SAS OLAP Cubes Data manipulation and modeling of some SAS vertical solutions However, the above tend to be small components in most SAS shops, but they cannot be ignored and they need to be provisioned on separate physical file systems. In summary, the SAS workload can be |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://support.sas.com/resources/papers/proceedings17/SAS0569-2017.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
