Update: As of June 2025, SAS 9.4M9 is also now available! See SAS 9.4 M9 Now Available!!    What’s new with M8? ?  See the SAS® 9.4 Guide to Software Updates and Product Changes  For 9.4M8, security as its primary focus.  This is inclusive of upgrades to many of the third-party technologies used by the platform including but not limited to: The use of available SSL libraries from the operating environment (replacing the delivery of OpenSSL for SAS Foundation) OpenSSL for the SAS Web Server and Web Infrastructure Database SAS private JRE is updated to Java 11 and for mainframe hosts Java 8 continues to be supported  Spring Log4j Introduction of Pervasive Encryption for z/OS Geode (replacing Gemfire) Tomcat (replacing tc Server) Slide_webdav replacing Jackrabbit webdav Postgres Many Apache upgrades Hundreds of third-party jar upgrades Atomikos Transaction Essentials replacing Atomikos Extreme Transactions Update system requirements?  See the SAS 9.4 System Requirements for your operating system of choice.  The release adds support for major releases of supported operating systems and limits support for operating systems no longer supported by their manufacturers.  Some highlights of the changes (additions or removals from those supported in SAS 9.4M7) include: Support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Oracle Linux 7.9 is the minimum supported release.  8.x is supported and 9.1 has been added. (support for 6.x is removed) Support for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 is added (support for version 11 is removed) Support for AIX 7.2 TL5 is added (support for AIX 7.1 TLS 3 is removed) Support for Oracle Solaris 11.4 is added (support for Oracle Solaris 10 is removed) Support for Windows Server 2022 and Windows 11 is added (support for Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 and 2008 R2 is removed) Support for z/OS V2R1 is added (support for V1R11 is removed) Support for HP-UX is removed Are all SAS Solutions available with the initial ship of 9.4M8? See the SAS® 9.4 Guide to Software Updates and Product Changes and individual SAS Product documentation for detailed information.  Unlike prior SAS maintenance releases, not all SAS products and solutions are immediately available on SAS 9.4M8 as each is required to accommodate the significant improvements delivered and as such, those releasing on SAS 9.4M8 will become available in the coming months.  Note that some SAS 9.4 Solutions will not release on SAS 9.4M8 rather their upgrade path is to the Viya platform or CI360      Any Upgrade-in-place (UIP) information?  The UIP process works as it has in prior SAS releases.  See the  SAS® 9.4 Guide to Software Updates and Product Changes for important notes like: If the operating system of your pre- SAS 9.4M8 environment does not support Java 11 and you wish to use the SAS Migration Utility to migrate to SAS 9.4M8, then you must first migrate your pre-SAS 9.4M8 to a machine running an operating system in the same family as the pre-SAS 9.4M8 system that supports Java11. This migration requires the use of the SAS Migration Utility that corresponds to the pre-SAS 9.4M8 system. If your operating environment is not supported, you cannot perform an upgrade-in-place. ... View more

Greetings,   As you may have heard, Amazon has introduced several new instances that use the new Ice Lake chip from Intel.  These new instance types should work very well with SAS as replacements to existing AWS instances.  SAS has an inquiry in to Amazon to verify this statement.   For I3 and I3en instances, you can use the new I4i instances.   For M5dn or M5d instances, you can use the new M6i instances.   For R5dn or R5d instances, you can use the new R6i instances.    Please let us know if you run into any issues running on these new instance types.   Or if you have been successfully using these new instances, please let us know that as well.    Margaret ... View more

If you are a SAS 9.4 customer running on AIX, we wanted to let you know that IBM and SAS have jointly tested SAS 9.4 on the Power10 infrastructure.  Here is a paper that discusses the results of this testing.  Accelerate insights with SAS 9.4 deployed on IBM Power10 and IBM FlashSystem 9200     There is also a paper discussing the testing we did on Power9 here.  Accelerate insights with SAS 9.4 deployed on IBM Power9 and IBM FlashSystem 9150   As always, if you have any questions, please let us know. ... View more