The challenge of transforming big data into insights

As the amount of data available to businesses continues to grow, Its value also grows— but only if you can quickly discover the relationships, opportunities and risks in that raw data by converting it into meaningful insights. After you understand the data and build analytical models, you have to deploy it in the enterprise by making those insights available to decision makers. To do all that, you need a scalable, reliable and powerful solution that can support fast, in-depth data analytics.

SAS and Cisco can help. SAS world-class analytic capabilities and big data technologies, powered by Intel architecture, work with the Cisco Unified Computing System™ (Cisco UCS®) to provide a highly scalable, integrated enterprise solution for big data analytics. With this solution, you can gain faster time to insight, so your data can reliably inform and improve your business’ decision-making processes.

The benefits of data processing and analytics with SAS® and Cisco

Many organizations are moving to Hadoop for data storage and processing, relying on its ability to efficiently store, process, manage, and analyze large volumes of data. Companies have also used enterprise data warehouses (EDWs) for data processing and analysis. Both these solutions can provide customers with fast, scalable, highly available analytics by using SAS and Cisco® hardware configurations based on Intel® Xeon® processors E7 v3 family and Intel® solid-state drives (SSDs).

Traditional analytical solutions constantly move data from disk to computing nodes and back during processing. This approach incurs high costs in time, resources and bandwidth—and the larger the data sets, the higher the costs. By combining SAS Analytics on Cisco UCS with Hadoop or an EDW, you can achieve a faster, more efficient and less costly data storage and processing infrastructure.

Fast, scalable and reliable: A SAS® and Cisco solution for big data analytics

As big data expands, enterprises’ abilities to use diverse data are becoming increasingly critical. Enterprises may want to run real-time analytics at the site of data generation, create self-service business intelligence reports, visualize data in new ways to discover new trends, develop and refine analytical models interactively and much more. But to effectively use your data in these ways, you need a strong, stable analytics infrastructure.

The SAS Analytics and Cisco UCS solution is a unified, integrated answer to your analytics challenges. It works with both Hadoop and EDWs to accelerate time to insight while supporting the Internet of Things to your greatest advantage. It is scalable, flexible, efficient and agile, allowing you to quickly respond to changing business requirements.

So you can choose the option that matches your specific needs, the SAS and Cisco solution is available in two configurations with either rack or blade servers. One option is a scale-out solution for SAS with Hadoop, based on a Cisco UCS cluster with internal,

Realizing the power of analytics with SAS® and Cisco on Intel architecture

Cisco UCS combines high-performance computing, memory, storage and networking resources in one highly redundant and highly available package. Its unified approach in combination with its embedded, model-based management makes the solution simple for IT staff to deploy and troubleshoot. Through these benefits, it helps you reduce both data center costs and operating expenses.

The Cisco solution offers predictable, scalable performance, so you don’t have to worry about management problems as your company grows. Cisco UCS is reliable and consistent, and it integrates seamlessly with your existing applications, including SAS, to simplify data movement and management without disrupting your current infrastructure.

Cisco UCS is built for big data applications. It is designed to handle big data workloads of any size and complexity, so you can process and analyze the data quickly and reliably. You also have the capability to automate this entire process, meaning less manual work for your engineers and faster time to insight. The sooner you understand your data, the sooner you can start using it for innovation in your business.

Together, Cisco and SAS offer you a high-performing, easy-to-manage solution for big data analytics that will scale as your business and its data grow.

Why Cisco?

direct-attached storage, in which computing and storage resources scale together.

Alternatively, you can choose from a variety of traditional shared-storage solutions in which computing and storage resources scale independently. Cisco solution partners offer enterprise-class storage options that work with your current infrastructure and are massively scalable. Whether you’re creating larger clusters or adding new blade or rack servers, the SAS and Cisco solution can grow with your business.

With these advantages, you can build an efficient analytics lab specifically suited to your organization that delivers the accurate insights you need fast. Simultaneously, IT and business can collaborate to incorporate analytics into your operational processes, thereby gaining timely, relevant value from your data.

About SAS, Intel and Cisco

SAS is the leader in analytics. Through innovative analytics, business intelligence and data management software and services, SAS helps customers at more than 80,000 sites make better decisions faster. Since 1976 SAS has been giving customers around the world THE POWER TO KNOW®.

Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) is a world leader in computing innovation. The company designs and builds the essential technologies that serve as the foundation for the world’s computing devices. Additional information about Intel is available at intel.com.

For the past 30 years, Cisco has built the infrastructure over which data travels the world. Most of that data resides within Cisco solutions. With an installed base of more than 50 million devices representing a combined investment of more than

US$180 billion, we are the company of choice for delivering data.

We not only bring powerful data center solutions to small branch offices – we can also use analytic capabilities at remote individual routers and even cameras. This unique capability allows analysis to begin the moment the data is sensed. And it means that responsive actions can also be taken immediately. We are the only company with the footprint to bring analytics to data distributed throughout the network, the

Cisco.com.

Learn more

To learn more about how SAS and Cisco can help you increase the value of your data, contact your representative or visit sas.com/cisco.

Copyright © 2016, SAS Institute Inc. and Intel Corporation. All rights reserved. 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. Intel,

Cisco website. Third-party trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. The use of the word partner does not imply a partnership relationship between Cisco and any other company. Other brand and product names are trademarks of their respective companies.

2 Cisco UCS 6296UP 96-Port FabricInterconnects

4 Cisco UCS B460 M4 Blade Servers, each with 4 Intel Xeon processors

• Intel Xeon Processor E7-8891 v3

• 512 GB of memory

• Cisco UCS VIC 1240

• 4 480-GB Intel SSD DC S3510 Series

16 Cisco UCS C240 M4 Rack Servers, each with 2 Intel Xeon processors

• Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-2680 v3

• 256 GB of memory

• Cisco UCS VIC 1227

• 2 120-GB Intel SSD DC S3510 Series

• 24 1.2-TB 10K SFF SAS Drives Shared Storage Array: Enterprise storage of your choice from our leading storage partners

Traditional Solutionwith Enterprise Shared Storage

Scale-Out Solution with Hadoop

2 Cisco UCS 6296UP 96-Port Fabric Interconnects

2 Cisco UCS 5108 Blade Server chassis with 2 Cisco UCS 2208XP Fabric Extenders

Direct connectivity to fabric interconnects or indirect connectivity through optional Cisco Nexus 2232PP 10GE Fabric Extenders

Cisco UCS is poweredby Intel Xeon processors.