SAS 9 Administration Refresher: About the SAS Software Depot

The SAS Software Depot is a network copy of your SAS media in a centralized and organized location. This location holds installation orders and other media for your SAS products. You create the SAS Software Depot, maintain it, and then use the files stored here to install, configure, and maintain SAS 9.

This post is part of a series on SAS 9 Administration concepts.

Preparing and creating the SAS Software Depot

You begin by downloading the SAS Deployment wizard using a web browser (at SAS Support Downloads). Use your SAS order number and SAS installation key from your Software Order Email to fill in the information when prompted in the wizard. You will also be prompted to specify a location for the SAS Software Depot, and have the wizard create the SAS Software Depot for you at your specified location.

The SAS Software Depot allows you to store multiple orders in one location and makes future upgrades easier by only downloading the changed files between releases to save on storage space. Mounting the SAS Software Depot in a network accessible location allows for distributed SAS 9 nodes to reach out and pull installation media, rather than downloading the files to each node.

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Since the complexity of each deployment of SAS 9.4 varies by product and solution, the required disk space for your depot will vary, and the SAS Deployment Wizard will provide you with a size estimate prior to creating a depot. As part of the creation process, an option will be asked if you want to remove duplicate files to save space. If checked, the SAS Download Manager evaluates and optimizes your depot after downloading your order. This optimization is performed on the entire depot including the latest download. Then the final Disk space required value could actually be smaller than the reported required disk space amount in the estimation.

Structure of the SAS Software Depot

The depot is organized in a specific format that is meaningful to the SAS Deployment Wizard. A non-exhaustive tour of the top-level directories here include:

depotsummary.html	A summary report of your orders stored in this SAS Software Depot
hot_fix directory	Created to store security updates and hot fixes
install_doc directory	Stores some documentation and summaries for each order
logs directory	Stores logs from the SAS Deployment Wizard
media_data, order_data, product_data, products directories	Stores various xml and binary data for your deployment
plan_files directory	Stores some site-specific diagram and plan files
sid_files directory	Provides a location to store SAS Installation Data (SID) files and license keys in one location.
standalone_installs directory	Stores installers for standalone client installs
third_party directory	Stores third-party product installers that are provided with SAS 9.
utilities directory	Contains a depot validation tool and a tool to migrate the depot to a new location.
vjr directory	Short for Versioned Jar Repository, containing zipped files that support Java applications and libraries.

Some third-party software can be obtained online from SAS; others might come provided with SAS 9. You can check in the following summary documentation to see if any third-party products are needed to support a given order ($SASDepot > install_doc > $order > ordersummary.html). More information here: SAS Help Center: Obtaining Third-Party Software

Managing the SAS Software Depot and Orders

The directory structure for the SAS Software Depot is created by the SAS Deployment Wizard. An administrator should add their SAS Installation Data (SID) files to the depot but stay away from renaming or modifying the directory structure. While it is technically possible to add custom subfolders, scripts, or other third-party installers to the depot, in the event you need to recreate or redownload the SAS Software Depot you might overwrite unexpected content. A better method would be to create a sibling folder structure adjacent to the SAS Software Depot directory to store your site-specific content.

/sas
    /SASDepot
    /Other_SASAdmin_Content
        /our_company_sasnotes
        /custom_scripts
        /other_SAS_content_et_cetera

The SAS Deployment Wizard can be used to manage your orders in the SAS Software Depot as well. You can add meaningful descriptions to your various orders stored within a depot in order to better tell them apart, or delete an old order no longer needed. It is recommended to back up a depot before deleting, as there are limits on the number of times an order can be downloaded from SAS. See SAS Help Center: Managing SAS Orders for more information and step-by-step instructions. The Deployment Wizard can also make subsets of orders by making a copy of the original depot with certain filtered products or languages. A subset of an order makes it easier to provision clients or save on download time to certain environments who might not need all the complete features of the full order. See SAS Help Center: Subsetting SAS Software Orders for more information and step-by-step instructions.

Sometimes called air-gapped networks, dark sites, or sneaker-networks: some deployments of SAS are not accessible by external network, or where the SAS Software Depot is located. In this case, the SAS Deployment Wizard can be used to create an ISO disk image of a given software order from a SAS Software Depot. And if needed, this ISO can be placed on physical media. See SAS Help Center: Managing SAS Orders for more information and step-by-step instructions to create a disk image.

Verifying the SAS Software Depot

Included in the SAS Software Depot is a utility named the SAS Depot Checker Utility ($SASDepot > utilities > depotchecker). There are versions for Windows, Unix, and Z/OS. The utility verifies the integrity of the depot: looking for missing files, incorrect file sizes, incorrect permissions, and mismatched checksums that might indicate corrupted or modified files. If any issues are detected, use the SAS Download Manager to download the depot again.

And hey: keep the SAS Software Depot around. It will store hotfixes, multiple future orders, and make maintenance of the platform easier by retaining this information in one location. Perform backups of your depot and ensure security settings are in place so that only SAS Administrators and Systems Architects have access. This directory structure contains your installation media, and your license/SID files. You want to make sure these things are around when you need to use them.

Thanks for reading. Some other resources of note when working with a SAS Software Depot:

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