SAS selects NetApp Astra to protect its Kubernetes-based SAS Viya analytics platform on Microsoft Azure

SAS, a global analytics leader, chose NetApp^® Astra™ to provide a disaster recovery (DR) solution for its SAS Viya offerings deployed as a Hosted Managed Service in the SAS Cloud on Microsoft Azure.

Viya is SAS’ next-generation cloud-native data analytics platform that helps enterprises speed up their data analysis capabilities. Although organizations that invest in Viya see significant improvements in arriving at data-driven, insightful decisions, they also require Viya in the SAS Cloud on Azure to be disaster tolerant.

The SAS Cloud delivers the value of SAS software in a managed environment and runs on Azure. SAS Hosted Managed Services in the SAS Cloud provide a fully outsourced enterprise solution to help organizations manage data and analytic assets for their users. Delivered through the SAS Cloud, there is zero hardware footprint for customers to manage. SAS provides hosting expertise to build, update, and support the environment, coupled with expertise to answer the most difficult questions.

Viya is a Kubernetes application that is implemented with thousands of Kubernetes resources, including third-party databases, messaging, and logging. SAS uses Azure NetApp Files for Viya’s persistent storage needs to deliver the high performance that Viya workloads require.

Gone are the days of providing home-grown disaster recovery and protection for stateful artificial intelligence and machine learning, big data, and database workloads. Enter data protection and disaster recovery for an industry-leading enterprise analytics platform, Viya, with NetApp Astra Control. Astra Control makes analytics applications on Viya more dependable, making business-critical analytics application environment and data quickly recoverable. Specifically, the DR functionality optimizes recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) windows, increasing the resilience of the Viya platform.

According to Mike Morris, vice president (IaaS) of SAS, “Solving the SAS disaster recovery challenge for solutions deployed as a Hosted Managed Service in the SAS Cloud on Microsoft Azure improved the Viya analytics platform industry-leading adoption. SAS partnered with the NetApp Astra team to deliver robust DR capabilities that exceed our RPO/RTO targets. Our analytics platform benefits from NetApp’s proven data management technology, enabling efficient high-performance backups, replication, and recovery.”

SAS selected NetApp Astra Control as its cloud-native data protection services solution. The industry-leading DR capabilities of Astra Control stood out from competitors’ offerings. Specifically, the tight integration of Astra Control and Azure NetApp Files that drives high performance and low latency to the end user was critical to their decision. The integration between Astra Control and Azure NetApp Files also provides fully automated storage provisioning and instantaneous NetApp Snapshot™ copies. NetApp plans to continue improving Astra Control DR technology to meet Viya’s growing cloud-native DR service needs.

Eric Han, vice president, Product Management, Cloud at NetApp, said, “We are thrilled that SAS has selected NetApp Astra for Viya’s application data protection needs, thanks to the tight integration of Astra with Microsoft Azure NetApp Files. We collaborated with the SAS team to build this solution with their needs in mind, simplifying Kubernetes data management while providing comprehensive disaster recovery capabilities.”

Casey McGee, vice president of Global ISV Sales at Microsoft said, “It’s great to see Microsoft’s collaboration with SAS continue to drive innovation. Together, we’re offering our joint customers a powerful disaster recovery solution with NetApp Astra that will ensure analytics applications in the SAS Cloud on Microsoft Azure are more dependable and critical data is quickly recoverable.”