HP Workstations.. At Work At.. SAS Institute Inc., Cary, NC How HP Helps SAS Institute's Source Management Group "Steal" Some Computers Every Night SAS Institute's industry-leading information-delivery software covers the entire operation of the enterprise: from executive-information systems to financial-planning products, econometric models to performance monitors, report generators to project-management tools. Based on consistent, easy-to-use visualization and graphing capabilities, the SAS System provides a seamless view of an organization through total control over data access, management, analysis and presentation -- no matter where the data resides. In other words, these products provide today what open industry-standard systems hope to provide tomorrow: an intuitive graphical user interface to distributed data no matter how or where it is stored. Such a capability is available today because SAS Institute decided in 1985 that it couldn't wait for the industry standards to evolve. The leading data management software that SAS System applications use runs on all the leading system platforms. To give customers their choice of mainframes, VAX, Windows, DOS, OS/2 or UNIX environments, SAS Institute ports its very complex code everywhere. The SAS System includes more than 125 separate applications "built to work together." That's over 6,000,000 lines of code, according to Dave Phillips, of SAS Institute's Source Management Group. That size and complexity present quite a challenge to a group that has to "steal" its computers. That's why the group's day-to-day (we should really say night-to-night) success is a lesson for the industry. With Hewlett-Packard, SAS Institute Developers Never Have To Know They're At The Scene Of The Crime SAS Institute designs and develops products to work on many proprietary system platforms. But to do the design and development, SAS Institute uses a platform that is as close to industry standard as any available, an HP Apollo 9000 series Model 7xx system. During the day, there are over 800 HP720 workstations, internetworked on multiple Cabletron/Cisco-connected Ethernet LANs. The LANs are tied, in turn, to an FDDI ring of about 50 HP750 file servers. Every night, one or more of the LANs is "stolen," transformed into one "super" computing resource, becoming a powerful HP-UX computational cluster using HP Taskbroker. The SAS System Offers A Multivendor Architecture As Well Planned As The Great Train Robbery To speed the "build" process and get to market faster, SAS Institute made some important strategic decisions in the mid 80's relative to standardizing source-code development. Most important, it began writing its base source code in C for maximum portability. The alternative of developing, maintaining and distributing code coupled too tightly to multiple vendor's architectures would have slowed time to market and had a negative effect on quality. The success of this strategy (see sidebar on "What The Experts Say") proves how dedication to industry standards can be a major benefit to any software developer. In addition, SAS Institute's success provides a lesson about a fixed software-manufacturing methodology for updating and building code (see sidebar on their software-manufacturing strategy). In this case, no particular off-the-shelf CASE method was suitable because of its unique portability requirements. But Dave Phillips feels they achieved results similar to the packaged methodologies with their inhouse-built tools for: - checkin/checkout, - file comparisons, - storage differences, - scripts and - the actual build facility. The key is following the method consistently. Actual SAS System enhancements and upgrades are based on user input from the annual SAS User Group International (SUGI) conference, which draws users from around the world, and the SASware ballot available to all users. In the past decade, over 85% of the users' top-10 requests have been incorporated. At SAS Institute, individual product-development group (graphics, statistics, reporting, etc.) decide when code is ready to begin the build process. Testing is done by the many target vendor-specific-platform groups. Source Management is in the middle (see diagram). The Source Management Group facilitates code flow in two ways: - by supporting the ongoing, iterative updating of revisions in progress, and - by managing the build process when a revision is stable and ready for release to the target-platform groups for testing. Source Management uses the applications developers' own systems to get the job done. Originally, this was done at the same time as development. But in 1990, they moved to the client/server batch-cluster approach, using HP TaskBroker, because the developers' workstations had outstripped network power. The development and revise/build functions were getting in each others way, competing for processing power. HP TaskBroker solved the problem. It distributes the work of rebuilding and regenerating six to seven million lines of code on a nightly basis, after the developers have finished their daily work. This gives the developers the maximum power of their LANs during the day; and means they have access to the most up-to-date code when they begin work the next day. HP TaskBroker transparently selects the best workstation on the network to do a task, transfers the task's associated data to the workstation and starts the task. For example, a particular product-development group -- whose application is ready for release to the target groups -- might be set up with TaskBroker for four to five "build" phases, each consisting of 20 or more separate tasks. These tasks are C programs that perform UNIX-Make-like functions such as designating the files to be updated, checking date-time dependencies, executing commands, looking at files and comparing sources to runtimes, etc. HP clustering also figures in the development processes even when code is not ready for release to a target group. According to Dave Phillips, Source Management is seeing two-hour improvement over the use of individual servers because of HP Taskbroker software. And HP's consistent dedication to truly open systems and adherence to developed standards made HP-UX a perfect control mechanism for source-code development. All of which helps get the SAS System to market faster. They have/are planning to install Taskbroker in the Quality Assurance department as well. SAS Institute is also using HP disk arrays in its computational clusters. They have reduced downtime because of their RAID capabilities, provided increased storage capacity without having to increase the number of servers, and saved space as well. The Future: With New HP Cluster Concepts The Source Management Group May Have To Go Straight "Of course, it's still not the type of computational clustering where one workstation is stealing the other guy's cycles or accessing a file server while it's working," according to Phillips. Some day, that type of clustering may speed the iterative process in the same way batch clustering has helped the "build" process overnight. And tuning is still a "seat of the pants" operation, he says. They "look at which pieces execute first and move tasks around to enhance dispatching and execution." SAS Institute is depending on HP-sponsored Open Software Foundation DCE and DME products to provide the methodology to improve that process. Dave Phillips is also looking at the new Convex/HP cluster concept, which he feels may "keep workstations available even longer, moving the many different versions of the SAS System to market faster." Where the Source Management group reports processing time reduced from 12 hours using a single processor to 4 hours (depending on a lot of variables) using Taskbroker-supported clustering, they foresee an average build time of 2 hours if they go to a dedicated cluster concept. And that will be the end of the Source Management Group's double life. Look at what the experts say about SAS Institute's Multivendor Architecture products - "Some observers liken SAS's Multivendor Architecture products to IBM's SAA--the difference being that SAS has already begun to distribute its software." - Datamation - "SAS Institute has been ahead of its time in addressing the need of large corporations to escape hardware limitations." - Datapro Reports Today, the SAS System is supporting more than 3,000,000 users in 100 countries at over 25,000 sites and is one of the world's largest independent software companies and the 85th largest information-systems company. Dr. James H. Goodnight, SAS Institute President, has some simple advice for software developers who would also like to experience such growth: "Technology is not an end in itself. Instead, it is the means through which the organizations we serve can become more effective, more productive, more competitive and more profitable." In other words, build what the customer wants. In investing 35% of revenues in research and development, twice the industry average, Goodnight is following through on that advice. The key results of that research cited by users are the SAS System's tools for: - EIS - Application development - Object-oriented programming as well as end-user tools for: - Report writing - Graphics - Spreadsheets - Quality improvement - Financial modelling - Forecasting and the SAS Systems' wide range of data access, management, analysis and presentation capabilities. (sidebar on software methodology:) Despite constant prescriptions to become more like manufacturing, software development is still very much a service. Like the proverbial shoemaker whose children go barefoot, software providers even often fail to incorporate tools that would speed time to market. The result: when a supplier announces a new product, information-systems (IS) management adds a year to the promised delivery date when making plans that depend on that product. And when those same managers begin an inhouse project, they go to great lengths to set chief-executive and director expectations... to the point of fudging their own schedules by months. That's why IS managers and independent software vendors alike could learn from the SAS Institute. SAS Institute realizes the unpredictable nature of the programming art. But when the artists code their last line of the day, a computer-assisted process helps "build" that code into a product. The group builds software with the same precision, devotion to Total Quality Management Systems, time-to-market concerns and product-integration challenges as any chip foundry,, board fabricator or systems supplier. The Source Management Group's mission is to "synchronize the release of those various ports to the market as much as possible." And they want to increase the frequency of releases as well "to provide SAS System customers with enhancements and updates as often as prudently possible." Due to its inhouse-developed build process -- and the foresight to see this multi-platform need almost 10 years ago -- SAS Institute is: - already providing a "standard operating environment" at the information retrieval/delivery level - even while the IS industry is struggling to achieve standardization at lower system levels.