SOLUTION OVERVIEW

SAS® Viya ™

A powerful, open platform designed for your analytical challenges

Overview
Whether it’s a team of data scientists or mobile applications providing real-time answers, how
can organizations keep pace with accelerating analytical demands and deliver fast results that
fuel the best actions? Several things are needed:
• Superfast processing for data manipulation, exploration and advanced analytics.
• A unified software environment that can be easily managed, maintained and governed.
• Scalable, dynamic analytics processing that doesn’t stop, even when jobs fail.
• Direct access to a comprehensive suite of analytics for any data, of any size,
for multiple users.

SAS Viya is an open, cloud-enabled, in-memory platform that delivers everything you need
for quick, accurate and consistent results – all of the time. Elastic, scalable and fault-tolerant
processing addresses the complex analytical challenges of today and effortlessly scales to
meet your future needs. SAS Viya provides:

• A powerful, cloud-ready analytics platform from the analytics market leader.

• A single, open and unified analytics environment with a standardized code
base that bonds SAS and other leading analytical programming languages.
• A comprehensive and adaptive architecture for public cloud, private cloud and
operating system implementations.
Benefits be redefined for different deployments or data volumes, analytical
assets are portable. You can spend more time solving the next
SAS Viya enables your organization to conquer all kinds of analytical
question – instead of rewriting code.
challenges.
• Easily assemble and share insights derived from embedded Easily govern and maintain all of your analytical assets
analytical services. With SAS Viya, it’s possible to integrate all elements needed to build
• Build governed models, centralized for efficient deployment. and deploy analytics – whether they are defined in SAS, or written
• Quickly deliver answers and consistently get the best results. from other programming languages like Python, Java, R or Lua, or
called from public REST APIs. Access the power of SAS from one,
Welcome to the new world of SAS Viya. This open platform serves cohesive place, with a traceable inventory of all analytical assets.
everyone from data scientists and business analysts to application Monitor the degradation of models in production and solve syn-
developers and domain experts. It also provides the reliable, scalable chronization issues arising from different code bases. With a central
and secure analytics inventory management and governance neces- backbone for analytics, the cost of updates between different soft-
sary for agile IT. ware versions is eliminated. You can spend less time worrying about
version discrepancies and more time innovating.
Now your organization can handle the ever-changing and ever-
growing range of analytical demands – regardless of how many simul- Scale up and out as needed
taneous users you have, what size your data is or how often it’s refreshed. SAS Viya is designed for elastic cloud processing and easy scalability.
SAS Viya is designed with resilient, in-memory distributed processing Your organization can start with a small implementation and expand
for optimizing complex analytical workloads. as needed with no concern about being locked in with one cloud
provider. The code is the same, so you can run your applications
Reduce the cost of maintaining and managing anywhere without rewriting.
multiple code bases
From a single, centrally managed environment, all analytical tasks are Streamline day-to-day workloads and increase
united in a common base. There’s no need to use different tools to productivity
manage data access, manipulation, interactive exploration, statistics, With SAS Viya, analytical teams can explore the same data at the
forecasting, optimization, machine learning and other advanced same time using a visual, coding or REST interface – the choice is
model development and deployment activities. theirs. Reaching solutions faster with their preferred method reduces
learning curves and accelerates results. With one consistent code
Score code is automatically generated from the interface or directly base, collaboration is accelerated and staff are empowered to get the
from programs built by coders. And because code doesn’t have to insights they need.

Interactive
dashboards give
administrators
visibility across
the entire SAS
Viya analytical
environment,
including current
server usage,
system health
and user activity.
Challenges
• Computational issues with big data. Data continues to grow and • Lack of analytical governance. Open source technologies are
problems get more complex each day. You need a way to dispersed, need customized support and often aren’t integrated.
analyze diverse data, improve performance and get fast answers This lack of control over data and analytics heightens risks associated
to any analytical question. with maintenance, hidden costs, governance and compliance.

• Pressure to provide scalable solutions within constrained • Difficulty managing portfolios of diverse technologies. Multiple
budgets. IT organizations with unlimited budgets for technolo- tools are used for managing data and applications across organi-
gies just don’t exist. Does an affordable, agile enterprise architec- zations. As a result, it’s hard to trace data lineage and know
ture exist that can keep pace with user demands? what version of a model is in use, whether it reflects current
deployments and if it’s being refreshed as needed.
• Ever-changing everything. Constantly evolving business require-
ments and an onslaught of emerging technologies – how do you • Suboptimal technologies impede decision making. Slow tools and
determine the best long-term solution that can adjust to your technology silos make it impossible to consistently discover insights
changing needs? and move from innovation to operations in a timely manner.

Increase collaboration among teams analytical assets are united within a common environment to
Analytical professionals often spend too much time explaining provide a single, managed inventory across your organization.
business context or finding a common ground for communicating
about data and insights. A consistent code base underlying the
Fast, distributed in-memory processing
consolidated HTML5 web-based interface for visual data interrogations SAS Viya provides a highly available, distributed processing platform
and an interactive coding environment for popular programming crafted to handle multiple users and complex analytical workloads.
languages provide a consistent foundation for communicating – no Computing operations are automatically distributed across the cores
matter which approach is used to derive insights. Multiple users can of a single server or the nodes of a massive compute cluster. If a
analyze data how and when they need it, interactively collaborating node fails, fault-tolerant processing ensures blazingly fast speed is
during the data discovery and model-building process. retained.

All data, tables and objects are held in memory as long as required
Capabilities and for whomever is using them. Independent sessions ensure opti-
Cloud-enabled, elastic and scalable mized processing for everyone. The SAS Viya runtime engine
SAS Viya is built to be elastic and scalable for both private and public provides a secure, scalable multiuser environment for concurrent
clouds. Complex analytical, in-memory calculations are optimized for access. Users can collaborate to simultaneously explore the same
unconstrained environments and automatically adjust in constrained data, probe findings and identify analytically sound actions.
environments. The elastic processing effortlessly adapts to burst
There’s no need to rewrite code for processing on different systems.
processing using available resources – scaling computing capacity as
Portable code can be defined once, run anywhere and scaled to
needed. This elasticity lets you quickly experiment with different
solve any size data problem. Code built on SAS Viya runs in
scenarios and apply more sophisticated approaches to increasing
stream, in database, in memory, in Hadoop, in public and private
amounts and speeds of data.
clouds, and even in device. You get the idea: no infrastructure lock-in.
Open analytics coding environment
Resilient architecture with guaranteed failover
Empower your data scientists and statisticians with a breadth of
For answers you depend on, you need analytical processing power
analytics capabilities that are easily available from the coding
you can count on. All analytical computations should run without
language of their choice. Whether it’s SAS, Python, Java, R or Lua,
interruption. The fault-tolerant design of SAS Viya automatically
analytical professionals can access the power of SAS for data manip-
detects server failure, even across clusters. Processing is optimized
ulation, interactive data interrogations and advanced analytics.
and redistributed as needed. SAS Viya also manages several copies of
Designed as an open development platform, SAS Viya also includes data on the computing cluster. If a node in the cluster becomes
public REST APIs to all underlying functionality, so software devel- unavailable or fails, the required data is retrieved from another block.
opers can add proven SAS Analytics to applications. And all These self-healing mechanisms ensure high availability for uninter-
rupted processing and automated recovery.
 • Scalable to address the largest and most complex analytical
The SAS® Viya™ Difference problems. With automated in-memory management and intel-
• Unified analytics environment. SAS Viya delivers a common, ligent distributed processing, multiple users can hit the same
cohesive environment for developing, deploying and data without I/O bottlenecks.
managing all of your analytical tasks.
• Fit for agile IT. SAS Viya is engineered and built to run analytical
• Open for inclusive development. Designed as an open workload processing whenever it’s needed. And to deploy insights
platform, SAS Viya supports all of your analytical professionals. wherever needed – whether that’s in database, in memory, in
All underlying methods for data manipulation and analytics stream, in device, in Hadoop, or in private and public clouds. Your
development are available as REST APIs or from SAS and other analytics architecture is always resilient and secure.
leading programming languages like Python, Java, R and Lua.
• A modern architecture to meet analytical needs now and in the
• Ability to govern a single inventory of models. Only SAS Viya future. SAS Viya provides the optimal architecture for your teams to
creates one analytical inventory with comprehensive model sustain analytical innovation. Portable code can be defined
governance and management that includes SAS as well as once and run anywhere, enabling you to scale to any size data
models written in other languages. problem without recoding or replacing operational software.

Unified environment for all aspects of analytics into your existing SAS®9 deployments. We’ve ensured your in-
SAS Viya delivers a single, consolidated and cohesive environment vestment in SAS can continue to meet the analytical challenges
that integrates the administration, development and execution of of today, while also preparing for the future.
all analytical assets across your organization. Features such as full
versioning, authorship, lineage and change management enable To learn more about SAS Viya, please visit us at sas.com/viya.
comprehensive governance. SAS Viya provides centralized
adminis-tration and activity tracking of servers, job content and users
– secur-ing information based on your existing policies.

SAS® Viya™ Offerings

SAS Viya is an underlying foundation for a host of upcoming
solutions that will take advantage of this cloud-enabled, open platform.
Most offerings include a coding interface as well as an intuitive, visual
interface. Current SAS Viya products include:

• SAS® Visual Analytics.

• SAS® Visual Statistics.
• SAS® Visual Data Mining and Machine Learning.
• SAS® Visual Forecasting.
• SAS® Optimization.
• SAS® Econometrics.
• SAS® Visual Investigator.

You can also apply the processing power of SAS Viya Using SAS Environment Manager, individual and group
to your existing SAS assets, skill sets and experience. Execute permissions can be customized to a granular level. Administrators
SAS®9 code and models in SAS Viya or bring SAS Viya results can drill into access-level categories to further define settings.

To contact your local SAS office, please visit: sas.com/offices

SAS and all other SAS Institute Inc. product or service names are registered trademarks or trademarks of SAS Institute Inc. in the USA and other countries.
® indicates USA registration. Other brand and product names are trademarks of their respective companies. Copyright © 2017, SAS Institute Inc.
All rights reserved. 108233_G48729.0317