SPRE as potential SAS9.4 DR environment ?

[BigSASFan]

Hello SAS Friends,

We have a small SAS9.4 grid (only 3 nodes) server on Solaris, but we don't have DR (Disaster Recovery). Also except for the most basic load balance and failover, we haven’t been using advanced features like grid queue, queue priority etc.

If we install SAS Viya on Linux machines, we could install SPRE (SAS Programming Runtime Environment) at the same time.

Since it takes time and relatively long learning curve for both SAS developers and SAS Administrators to migrate from SAS9.4 to Viya, the whole process I think could be around one year.

One interesting question is, if we install SPRE as well, is it possible for us to put SPRE as a DR environment for our current SAS9.4 server ?

I appreciate your insights,

BigSASFan

[JuanS_OCS]

Hello @BigSASFan ,

yours is a very good and interesting question. Of course, this question would need to be answered, ultimately, by a SAS employee, but I can share my thoughts until then.

SPRE, while similar in many ways to SAS 9.4 to quite a degree, it has also several differences and it cannot be used always as a substitute. SPRE is not a full Base SAS (and SAS modules) product, it misses several modules and many procedures simply won't work. And if your code works using the GRID functionalities (such as SASGSUB, connect, etc), this certainly won't work.

This being said, although it wont help you right now, and only SAS employees can confirm or reject this idea, this perspective might help you in the future to you or to others:

As far as I am aware, SAS Viya 4 comes with an evolved SPRE with more SAS 9 functionality/support, and ideally speaking, in one of the future releases of Viya, SPRE should be a 1:1 supported model of SAS 9, shaping what SAS keeps telling us during the Global Forums about the ideal SAS Platform (no SAS 9, no SAS Viya, but a combination of both together).

My suggestion to you, at this moment, is to either have a separate full DEV/TEST/DR environment (depending on how much you want to pay for licencing), also GRID, but with less Grid nodes and resources (the minimum you need for your DR to work at the minimum required by your business processes), or, if the code does not use GRID functionality, a simple 1x SAS 9.4 server with all licensed products except for Grid itself.

I hope this helps!

Best regards,

Juan

[SASKiwi]

In my experience you can have a DR SAS 9 installation running on warm standby at no extra licensing cost as long as you can only have one SAS site operating at any one time (Primary or DR). It is best practice for your DR installation to have identical SAS architecture.