SAS Releases Big Data Visual Analytics Platform

Hadoop-based storage combined with visual data-exploration and predictive analytics capabilities make new SAS platform stand apart in in-memory computing.

It promises the speed-of-thought data-analysis capabilities of SAP Hana, the scalability of Hadoop, and the intuitive visual-analysis capabilities of Tableau. But what makes SAS Visual Analytics, a platform announced Thursday, truly stand out is the tie to the Cary, N.C.-based vendor's extensive predictive analytics portfolio.

SAS Visual Analytics is not an in-memory database. In fact, it liberates customers (and SAS) from dependence on an expensive third-party database because it holds data in memory on a rack of blades running the Hadoop Distributed File System. Customers won't have to know anything about configuring or running Hadoop, said SAS, because all the deployment, provisioning, and administration will be handled by the platform's SAS LASR Analytic Server. The platform has been tested with more than 20,000 columns and 1 billion rows of data, according to SAS, and to scale out, customers simply add more nodes.

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