Several customers have reported error messages with SAS 9.4 when trying to use it on the recently released RHEL 9.5.  We are working on a hot fix for this issue, but in the meantime please review the SAS Note below that discusses a workaround for the issue. 71068 - SAS® 9.4M8 (TS1M8) encounters OpenSSL errors on RHEL 9.5   UPDATE:  The SAS Hotfix has been released. Updates available for Base SAS 9.4_M8 : Hot fix M4B010 - SAS Support Communities   ... View more

SAS has a track history of helping clients to preserve application investment and IBM Z is an essential element of modernization and AI strategy.   SAS’ software combined with IBM Z capabilities allows companies to scale and adapt easily to future regulatory changes and market demands while ensuring consistent service quality and operational continuity.   Addressing today’s changing IT landscape Every day, clients face challenges in delivering integrated digital services. A large government agency with a rich history spanning several decades, found itself facing a critical business challenge.  The agency faced challenges in promptly determining benefits eligibility. Recognizing the urgency of decreasing the backlog, the customer leveraged IBM Z agility and SAS. A catalyst for success Recognizing the integral role that technology plays in shaping the government landscape, SAS outlined the strategic vision for the future and our continued support for IBM Z. As a part of the IBM Ecosystem, SAS is helping companies unlock the value of their infrastructure investments by implementing the tools and technologies designed to help them succeed in a hybrid cloud world. We are excited to work closely with the IBM Ecosystem to bring innovations to our clients.   It is not just SAS' saying this, but we have many SAS customers running on z/OS to analyze their large volumes of data.  They have tried several times to move these legacy SAS applications to other hardware but continue to stay on IBM Z hardware as it is the best platform to manage and analyze these large volumes of data in a short timeframe.  Here is an example of this:  “A large US government agency uses SAS on their mainframe to provide scoring for initial beneficiary applications which are flagged to quickly make determinations of eligibility, resulting in a significant decrease in the application backlog over the past 10 years.”  ... View more

Reference Name: Red Hat RHEL 8 Swappiness Algorithm Setting Requires  Severity: High Status: Changes affect all RHEL 8 Release Versions   Impact  RHEL 8 host systems can experience swap space usage, even though swap behavior is very low and there is plenty of memory.  This significantly slows application behavior, pushing in-memory activity to swap space on device (RHEL Swap Space on disk/flash storage).   Description Numerous virtual memory management changes were made between RHEL 7 and RHEL 8 to account for much faster storage subsystem interaction with virtual memory operations.  One of these changes involved the RHEL 8 Swappiness Algorithm.  The Swappiness setting in the algorithm was changed, and requires resetting back to the RHEL 7 default value.  NOTE:  RHEL 9 Swappiness Algorithm was reverted to the RHEL 7 default tuning values, and does not require this fix.     Solution Please carefully review the following Red Hat Solutions notes to change the Swappiness Algorithm settings to an appropriate configuration to SAS.  The first link discusses the difference in behavior between RHEL 7 and RHEL 8.  The second link shows several ways to return to RHEL 7 Swappiness.    ·       Swappiness Algorithm – General Setting - Change in swap behavior between RHEL 7 and RHEL 8 kernels - Red Hat Customer Portal·       Swappiness Algorithm -  Cgroups Settings https://access.redhat.com/solutions/6785021 Premature swapping while there is still plenty of pagecache to be reclaimed - Red Hat Customer Portal   For RHEL 8 we suggest using the vm.force_cgroup_v2_swappiness feature   # echo "vm.force_cgroup_v2_swappiness=1" >> /etc/sysctl.d/99-sysctl.conf   # sysctl -p /etc/sysctl.d/99-sysctl.conf   The tuned config file for throughput-performance already sets vm.swappiness to 10.  Tuned profile virtual-guest inherits throughput-performance.  These are the profiles recommended for SAS environments.   If you have questions or require any assistance with this topic, please contact your SAS Technical Support Representative.     ... View more