SAS Institute Demonstrates Support for New Pentium III
Xeon Processor-Based Servers; Integrating the Latest Server
Architecture With Powerful Decision-Support Solutions
ACTION ITEMS
SAS Institute Inc., a recognized leader in data warehousing and decision support, demonstrated its enterprise software solutions running on Intel Corporation's Pentium III Xeon processor-based servers at launch events for the new processor in New York and San Francisco recently.
In the demo, SAS Institute highlighted the flexibility, scalability and performance of a client/server computing model (powered by Pentium III Xeon processor-based servers) for various organizational computing tasks such as Web-based reporting, querying remote data from a customer data warehouse, and decision support analysis and forecasting. SAS Institute partnered with IBM and SCO to emphasize support for the Pentium III Xeon processor in the IBM Intellistation and IBM Netfinity servers, running both Windows NT 4.0, SCO UnixWare and IBM DB2.
"SAS Institute is focused on delivering intelligent and complete data-warehousing and decision-support solutions to companies worldwide," said Mike Pope, director of the enterprise software program at Intel. "These SAS Institute solutions, powered by new Pentium III Xeon processor-based servers, provide enterprises with a competitive advantage by enabling business managers and analysts to access and analyze corporate data on a more scalable and performance-enhanced environment."
Performance improvements
Many SAS Institute customers are implementing enterprise resource planning (ERP) and other heavy transactional processing systems, as well as deploying enterprise data warehouses and customer-relationship management (CRM) solutions that pull data out of these systems. For all of these applications, the speed of the processor and the ability to scale to multiple processors is critical for business decision-making.
The new Pentium III Xeon processor-based servers offer these customers significant performance improvements. Chief among these are its faster system speed and larger cache, which translate into better performance for data warehousing, data mining, and transactional applications that involve database access. The new servers also support either Windows NT or SCO UnixWare, giving customers more choice in their operating environment.
For more information on how SAS(R) software exploits the newest technologies of the Pentium III Xeon processor-based server for enterprise decision support, see "A Higher Level of Performance" technical backgrounder at http://www.sas.com/partners/enterprise/msinfo.
"With the new Pentium III Xeon processor-based servers available today, and future 64-bit processors on the horizon, Intel has clearly outlined its commitment to providing a robust architecture for enterprise computing," said Barrett Joyner, president of SAS Institute North America. "We look forward to continuing our joint efforts with Intel to optimize the performance of SAS software solutions on their 64-bit processors and beyond."
Turning data into knowledge
SAS Institute provides companies and government agencies with software solutions that help them leverage their data and turn it into knowledge. Companies collect enormous amounts of data in transactional-processing or ERP systems, for example. With SAS software's powerful data-warehousing, data-mining and analytical capabilities, these organizations can access, manage, analyze and exploit the data from these transactional or ERP systems - as well as data from almost any kind of data store on any platform - and turn it into information that business decision-makers can act upon for competitive advantage.
SAS Institute & Intel: A history of partnering
Intel and SAS Institute have a long history of working together - including a formal business partnership since 1991 - in order to optimize and exploit each other's new technologies as they develop. This relationship ensures that when new technology from Intel becomes available, SAS software solutions will be ready to support it. Ultimately, the goal of the partnership is to maximize customers' return on investment in server hardware and SAS software solutions.
SAS Institute has been an early tester of a number of Intel's processors (Pentium, Pentium II, Pentium III Xeon) and continues to evaluate Intel's future processors, including the Merced processor scheduled for release in mid-2000. The Institute has also profiled succeeding versions of SAS software in Intel's benchmarking labs, with the goal of optimizing performance on Intel architecture.
About SAS Institute
SAS Institute, one of the top 10 independent software vendors, is the leader in decision support and data warehousing, providing integrated enterprise information-delivery solutions. The Institute markets packaged business solutions for vertical industry and departmental applications, as well as an integrated suite of software tools, that allow companies to transform the wide variety of data within their organizations into information that business users and researchers need to make better decisions. SAS software and services are used at more than 33,000 business, government, and university sites in 115 countries. Founded in 1976, SAS Institute is the world's largest privately held software company with annual revenue of $871 million.
Please visit SAS Institute's Web site: http://www.sas.com.