Linux Arquitecture | SAS VA, Risk Management

[MariaD]

Hi everyone,

We have a SAS IFRS 9 solution. Now, we are moving to three Linux Server. What would be the best way to optimize the SAS servers arquitecture? One server dedicated for server tier, one dedicated for metadata tier and one for web-server tier? Is it possible to have two server dedicated to web-server tier?

Thanks in advance for the suggestions. 

[SASKiwi]

SAS provides a free server scoping service that goes through all of your basic requirements to come up with a server infrastructure design that meets your needs. I highly recommend you take advantage of this service. It is impossible to give good recommendations on server architecture without knowing a lot more about your requirements and this is beyond the scope of the Community.

We ourselves have just implemented an IFRS9 solution, but it was done all in Foundation SAS on our existing Office Analytics platform. If you are implementing any of SAS's Risk products then you need to be guided by SAS in scoping the IT hardware resources to run these. It is important to know about the number of potential SAS users, estimated data volumes, and the SAS software being used. 

[JuanS_OCS]

Hi there,

I concur with your previous answer by SASKiwi, when you have doubts, it is always a good idea to contact your SAS representative looking for a SAS Architect and/or this service mentioned by SASKiwi.

In other hand, I can answer one of your questions: you can have 2 servers dedicated for SAS Web tier, making an horizontal cluster. This is useful when you want to add more be of the following features/capabilities:
- load balancing for better hardware usage
- additional users that won’t fit in the sized server (and load balancing)
- high-availability and failover
This is the link to the documentation;
https://documentation.sas.com/?docsetId=bimtag&docsetTarget=n0cc6kr7j55xg7n1nntn3w1hi9c2.htm&docsetV...

When you have doubts and enough resources, it is always a good idea to place every SAS tier on separated servers, and virtual ones rather on just physical (unless you look for the highest performance, then you need to think further), because it helps a lot when you want to resize (after you see your hardware resources are suffering to usage) or re-configure (such as adding clusters on any SAS tier)

Does it help?

[MariaD]

Hi @JuanS_OCS ,

We already configure one linux server as compute (installing and configure server and middle tier on it) and two additional linux server with only middle tier. 

We need to configure anything else to work as horizontal cluster for web application? That's mean, now if we go to company.com:7980/SASVisualAnalyticsHub, SAS MC directly distribute redirect for any of the middle tier? 

Regards,

[Anand_V]

Hi @MariaD,

Middle-Tier has many components like SAS Web Server, SAS Web Application Server, SAS Cache Locator and SAS JMS Broker.

If you are adding an horizontal cluster member to deploy only your Web Application Instances then
SAS Web Server which is a HTTP Proxy Load Balancer will service requests to both the Middle-Tier Nodes.

Here are the steps to add additional horizontal cluster member:
https://go.documentation.sas.com/?docsetId=bimtag&docsetTarget=n0cc6kr7j55xg7n1nntn3w1hi9c2.htm&docs...

However if you are planning to deploy all components including web server for an HA Architecture you will need an external Load Balancer.

Here is the link with the list of features that can be HA in Middle-Tier.
https://go.documentation.sas.com/?docsetId=bimtag&docsetTarget=n14182gcigmyicn1huwlyl49s5fr.htm&docs...

Thanks!

[MariaD]

Thanks @Anand_V . Yes, we follows the procedure described for add a horizontal cluster component. So, in this case, the SAS Web Server manage all the request and automatically balance it between my horizontal clusters.

In our case we have the principal server called sas.mycompany.com and two horizontal cluster, called sasw1.mycompany.com and sasw2.mycompany.com. 

That means, the users access SAS VA for the main server (sas.mycompany.com) and SAS Web Server distribute the request to balance load. Is it correct?

[Anand_V · Accepted solution]

Hi @MariaD,

Ideally yes it should work, if all the configurations were done as per the document and no error's were reported.

Thanks!