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Joshuah
Fluorite | Level 6

Dear All,

I am looking for sample SAS Sizing Questionnaire being filled out. Does anybody has any relevant documentation, or know where I can get it from ?

Any suggestion/tips are appreciated. Thanks a lot.

10 REPLIES 10
Doc_Duke
Rhodochrosite | Level 12

SAS has a group that can help you size a system.  As you can see from it is non-trivial.  It largely depends on your budget and what your users consider acceptable response times.

You can do almost everything in Base and SAS/Stat using a Win-7/64 machine with a lot of memory and a big disk drive.  For bigger data problems, that assumes you have a substantial tolerance for delayed gratification (it can take days for some analyses to finish).

Joshuah
Fluorite | Level 6

Hi Doc@Duke,

Thanks for the response.

Could you let me know the name of the group that help with sizing ? Thanks.

Best,

Joshy John

Doc_Duke
Rhodochrosite | Level 12

Just call your SAS marketing rep.  They can put you in touch.

Patrick
Opal | Level 21

What do you want to size? And can you do this independently of the SAS license? If this is also about contractual changes then may be your starting point should be the BR (Business Requirements) and then sending a RFP (Request for Proposal) to SAS. To answer such a RFP SAS will need to do some sizing based on the BR.

MarcoGuimaraes
Obsidian | Level 7
Patrick, I'm 2 years late in this conversation, but I think he was referring to the Hardware Sizing Questionnaire. You receive one (or more) when you already bought the licenses and need to define what fits better regarding memory and processor power to your SAS servers. I'm facing some troubles to answer my questionnaires. A lot of questions about the amount of data we will deal with, concurrent sessions (and amount of users), how many batch processes will run in each period of the day, if you have a preferred hardware vendor, etc. Some questions are hard to answer at the beginning of the project when you need to build everything from scratch. In this case, business requirements usually are not enough.
JuanS_OCS
Amethyst | Level 16

Hello @MarcoGuimaraes ,

 

I understand and I know they can be hard to get some answers ready, specially when something starts from scratch. However you can run estimations. And if for some of the questions the estimations are still not enough, it means that you are missing either architecture sessions (at least some details from them) or a PoC exercise where you can get a better sense of what your systems will host and require.

 

If this is something you can not get from yourself or within your company, my best suggestion is to approach SAS Institute and/or a SAS partner, who can help you with some pre-sales / consultancy services.

pradeepv
Fluorite | Level 6

Hi,

I'm just curious, does this mean there are no resources available from SAS, to perform sizing exercise, does everyone have to work with SAS professional services to perform sizing. Please clarify?

Like some other vendor tools, have a decent documentation on sizing.

Kurt_Bremser
Super User

It is not a simple calculation.

Before you start, you need to gather

- your user's information needs

- information about the logical data needed to cover the information needs

- information about the physical structure of the data (you get your size information from that)

- information about time series (monthly data online for three years -> multiply size by 36)

- number of expected concurrently active sessions/processes

- who will use which parts of the SAS system?

You can then size your storage for the data. Maximum/average dataset size will give you a hint for the sizing of RAM (to help in caching) and for the needed I/O throughput of the storage subsystem.

Number of concurrent processes and type of operations (simple data steps can work with a very small memsize, proc olap or statistical procedures may/will need more) will give you a hint for RAM needed to keep the system from paging. You will also be able to make an educated guess about CPU power.

The best help in sizing a suitable server environment is to set up an initial small scale implementation for a project, get a feel for your needs and the requirements and extrapolate from there.

For newer products like SAS/VA and the LAZR server, I guess that the SAS people themselves are still in the "get a feel" phase.

jakarman
Barite | Level 11

Joshuah when you can not give any answers on that nice list Kurt made, what answers would you expect to get from external SAS staff?
With some products/solutions an indication for the technical hardware is mentioned.

That is eg done with EMiner where at the installation in the software depot those docs are found. So first buy/do a POC and than you can find those.

It looks to me this is not the best order for a project planning as you are starting organizing the hardware and then try to put it on functional working.

The best approach for design in advance would be searching for the system-requirements with tools/solutions

System Requirements--SAS® Enterprise Miner(TM) 13.1  Do not forget to sum up all of those instead for looking at the least sized one.l    

---->-- ja karman --<-----
MarcoGuimaraes
Obsidian | Level 7

Hi, @Joshuah! How was your experience with this task? Did you get some help from SAS? (or did you find something googling or on SAS help pages?).

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