Date:         Wed, 12 May 2004 18:40:53 -0700
Reply-To:     Nova's Taylor <novastaylor@HOTMAIL.COM>
Sender:       "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
From:         Nova's Taylor <novastaylor@HOTMAIL.COM>
Organization: http://groups.google.com
Subject:      Moving from SAS/CONNECT to ? : SAS Terminal Servers?  Hardware
              specs? Advice?
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

Hi folks,

  The company I work for has recently outgrown the SAS/CONNECT,
remote-submit model and we are now looking at alternative
architectures.  We have several offices worldwide and programming
teams may work cooperatively on projects that are remote from their
home office.  Wide area network bandwidth makes SAS/CONNECT
impractical.

We have reached a critical decision point: How do we proceed?  Perhaps
we should move to a system where SAS is available on a Terminal Server
Farm of 2-3 servers per site, where users login, start up the SAS/DMS
on the remote machine, and work there? What if we switch to batch mode
- will users rebel at the lack of an enhanced editor, or love the
simplicity of a commmand line?

Other background info: We are a Microsoft shop, so Windows 2003 Server
would be the OS. I have no choice in that matter.   We are not
interested in SAS/IntrNet or a Portal solution.

I am looking for anyone who would like to share their experiences from
both a user and admin perspective.  I will be working with SAS to
determine potential hardware specifications, but would like to hear
from individuals "in the field" in terms of server specs,
configuration, and approaches.  Are you running interactive SAS? Batch
SAS? SAS DMS on terminal servers? How have you solved the "resource
pooling" issue where your program team is spread out, but your data is
centralized?  Maybe there is an approach that I am overlooking?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.  Please email me offline at
NovasTaylor@hotmail.com and I will gladly summarize my findings for
SAS-L at a later time.


Taylor
SAS Admin
NovasTaylor@hotmail.com