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kcskaiser
Fluorite | Level 6

Lately we have had a lot of discussions internally about how and when to apply patches and other maintenance to both our SAS Servers and windows workstations. We have a 24/7 shop in the sense that jobs (primarily SAS/E.G.) could be running at any time of the day. These jobs often run 12+ hours and are generally contained in Ordered Lists. Scheduling an OL is anything but easy in SAS v9.2 so at the moment all are being run by the user as the need arises.

This of course means that if IT decides to upgrade/patch/reboot his workstation the connection is lost and the jobs are killed. Same is true of course for the servers but those we usually have a warning about before the patch is done.

How is your company handling and scheduling these very necessary but troublesome windows patches? The more details I can gather the easier it will be for me to communicate options that maybe IT hasn't thought of, so please be specific. I'm pushing for an upgrade of SAS and moving it to Red Hat Linux, you're impressions about this same issue here would be welcome also.

Thanks in advance for any ideas/thoughts you have.

2 REPLIES 2
LinusH
Tourmaline | Level 20

If you are a true 24/7 you can't relay on jobs running on workstations.

Working with virtual clients/terminals server technology gives you a lot more options how to manage uptime.

For servers there's technology that handles fail over, or a SAS Grid. This means that you can take one server at the off the environment to do maintenance.

Data never sleeps
JuanS_OCS
Amethyst | Level 16

Hi,

 

as Linus mentions, there are many technologies available for enabling High Availability on your servers and on your workstations.

There are some general ICT technologies. I.e:

- Example for servers: to create a cluster (active/passive with sync is a good first approach) of your servers and, optionally, your critical filesystems.

- Example for workstations: Virtualized clients (Microsoft AppV, Citrix, VM ThinApp... that can be pushed under an schedule.

 

You may want to read a bit:

http://support.sas.com/resources/papers/proceedings14/SAS305-2014.pdf

 

And, of course, as Lunus also mentioned, SAS Grid can be an option as well.

 

Best regards,

Juan

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