Introducing Notilyze Cloud: The Next Chapter for SaasNow

Following the successful launch of our Center of Excellence for SAS Viya, we are excited to announce a significant rebranding within our organization. Our sister company, SaasNow, will from now on continue to operate under the name Notilyze Cloud. This strategic rebranding aligns with our commitment of providing comprehensive and integrated data analytics solutions under the Notilyze umbrella. 

Notilyze Cloud: Full-Service Hosting for SAS Viya Environments 
At Notilyze Cloud, we are dedicated to providing the same high-quality, full-service hosting solutions you know from SaasNow, ensuring your operations run seamlessly and efficiently. Based in the European Union, we prioritize data residency within the EU to help you meet regulatory and compliance requirements. 

While our roots are in the EU, we are committed to serving you, our clients, worldwide. Our robust infrastructure and dedicated support team ensure that no matter where you are, you can benefit from our advanced hosting solutions. 

Notilyze Cloud offers flexible hosting options tailored to meet your diverse needs: 

• Private Datacenter in Amsterdam: Our state-of-the-art datacenter in Amsterdam provides secure, high-performance hosting for clients prioritizing data residency and compliance within the EU. 
• Public Cloud Providers: For those who prefer the scalability and flexibility of public cloud services, we offer hosting on leading public cloud platforms, giving you the freedom to choose the best environment for your needs. 

 
Trusted Partner of SAS 
Many SAS customers and SAS partners trust Notilyze Cloud to provide reliable and efficient hosting services. Our close collaboration with SAS ensures that you can continue using our services seamlessly, benefiting from our expertise in managing SAS environments. You can deploy your environment entirely through self-service, providing you with the flexibility and control needed to manage your analytics infrastructure efficiently.  

Why Is There Need for a Rebranding? 
The renaming to Notilyze Cloud underscores our unified vision and mission to deliver unparalleled analytics, IT, and cloud services. By consolidating our brand, we strengthen our position as leading provider of data-driven solutions and enhance our ability to support you with a cohesive and comprehensive service portfolio. 

What Can I Expect From the Rebranding? 

• Uninterrupted Services: The rebranding will not affect the quality or continuity of services. You can expect the same reliable support and performance that SaasNow has always delivered. 
• Enhanced Integration: As Notilyze Cloud, we will leverage the combined strengths of our analytics and cloud services to offer you even more innovative solutions. 
• Data Residency Assurance: Our EU-based operations ensure that data residency and compliance with European regulations remain a top priority, providing you with peace of mind.  
• Global Service: No matter where you are in the world, you can take advantage of our hosting solutions, benefiting from our expertise and infrastructure. 
• Trusted by SAS: Many SAS customers and SAS partners rely on Notilyze Cloud for their hosting needs and will continue to receive the same level of service and support. 

About Notilyze and SaasNow 
Founded in 2015, SaasNow introduced a unique monthly subscription model that revolutionized how businesses access and deploy analytics environments. Since becoming part of Notilyze in 2018, SaasNow has continued to innovate and deliver exceptional service, now under the name Notilyze Cloud. 

Notilyze is dedicated to helping organizations become successful through data-driven solutions. With a focus on analytics, IT, and cloud services, we provide end-to-end support to ensure our clients achieve measurable results. Our advanced Analytics Platform, based on SAS technology, and our team of experts enable organizations to harness the power of data for growth and innovation. 

 
Contact Information 

Notilyze Cloud
Stationsplein 45 A4.004 
3013 AK Rotterdam 
+31 10 798 62 95 
info@notilyze.com 

Read more on www.notilyze.com/en/cloud. 

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SAS Viya Stable 2022.11 and LTS 2022.09 now available on SaasNow

SAS Viya Stable 2022.11 is now available on SaasNow! SAS also released SAS Viya Long Term Support (LTS) 2022.09, which is now also available on SaasNow.

This latest release of the Viya platform adds support for kubernetes version 1.24, and contains many new features for end-users!

You can deploy the latest release through our self-service portal, your environment will be ready within one business day. All Viya 4 bundles and products are supported!

SaasNow at SAS Explore 2022

Earlier this month, SaasNow hosted two sessions at SAS Explore 2022:

Tom Dogger – Sizing your SAS® Viya® 4 Environment
Jelle Daemen – Managing SAS® Viya® 4 at Scale in the Cloud

It was great to share our experience on managing SAS in the cloud for our customers and partners!

If you were unable to attend the event, our sessions are still available for viewing on-demand at: https://explore.sas.com/

Viya 2022.1.2 now available on SaasNow

SAS Viya 2022.1.2 is now available on SaasNow!

This latest release of the Viya platform adds support for kubernetes version 1.23, as well as full support for opensource kubernetes.

You can deploy the latest release through our self-service portal, your environment will be ready within one business day. All Viya 4 bundles and products are supported!

Viya 2022.1 now available on SaasNow

Last week, SAS released a new LTS and stable version of the Viya platform, versions 2022.1 LTS and 2022.1.1 stable. We are happy to announce that this release is now available on SaasNow. You can deploy your Viya 2022.1 or 2022.1.1 environment through our portal.

Through our portal, you can deploy a SAS environment with your own license. Both Viya 3.5 as well as Viya 4 (version 2021.2.5 stable, 2021.2 LTS and later) are supported.

For pricing, visit our pricing page or contact our sales team!

Sizing your Viya 4 environment

At SaasNow we have deployed dozens of SAS Viya 4 environments since the initial release at the end of 2020. Whilst the underlying technology of SAS Viya 4 has radically changed from a microservices approach to a cloud-native Kubernetes deployment model, these changes are mostly invisible to end-users of the platform compared to Viya 3. The new deployment model, however, has quite some impact on how to size and scale your environment.  

We have a lot of customers and partners that have questions about sizing their SAS Viya 4 environment. Therefore we decided to write this blog post about how we approach sizing of your SAS environment. Please note that for specific sizing, both SAS and SaasNow have specialized teams available to help you size your environment based on your exact requirements, but these guidelines should help you get started.

The basics

To start with some bad news; you will need more resources to run a minimal Viya 4 deployment than you needed to run a minimal Viya 3 deployment. While we could start and run a Viya 3 environment with SAS Visual Analytics on a 4 vCPU machine, as of today with the Viya 2021.2.5 stable release, you will need at least 16 vCPU to start an environment with SAS Visual Analytics, and 32 vCPU if you want to run a more extensive suite like SAS Visual Data Science Decisioning. Notable exception is SAS Analytics Pro, which can still start on a 4 vCPU environment.

While you will need more vCPUs to start a Viya 4 environment, the memory requirements have not increased. This is why we have introduced new machine types at SaasNow to better accommodate the new vCPU requirements of Viya 4. Whilst for Viya 3 we had extreme high-memory allocation per vCPU, for Viya 4 we`ve decided to double the amount of vCPUs per node. This means the new machine types better suit the new vCPU requirements of Viya 4, while still having the opportunity to use in-memory processing for analytics workloads.

In our Amsterdam datacenter, all our machine types utilize extremely fast, local-only, SSD-only storage. All machine types can be combined according to your requirements, and additional disk space can be allocated to each machine type.

Analytics workloads and supporting services

In general, SAS makes a difference in the following workloads for Viya 4;

• Stateless services
• Stateful services
• Programming workloads
• CAS workloads

The most contained approach to sizing your SAS environment is to create dedicated node(pool)s for each of these workloads, but this leaves some headspace on every node. Our initial suggestion is therefore to combine services on a node where possible; combining stateful and stateless services on one ‘supporting services’ node and combining programming and CAS workloads on another ‘analytics’ node is a good starting point.

Use case and software selection matter

For SaasNow, every environment we host is considered a production environment. However, your use case for your environment may not be identical for every environment. You may want a small environment to test new features, that does not have the same (high availability) requirements as your production environment. At SaasNow you are flexible in deciding the nodes for your environment. Typically we see the following variations;

• For proof-of-concept, test or smaller environments, we usually see a single server solution. Whilst large analytics workloads may influence other users’ experience in this kind of setup, this is the most cost effective way of giving Viya 4 a go.
• For production environments, we usually see at least 2 nodes, splitting the supporting services from the analytics workloads. CAS and programming are combined on one node, with CAS running in Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP) mode. This is a good balance between cost and performance
• For environments with high analytics workloads, a single CAS node can be transformed into a multi-node setup, putting CAS in Massively Parallel Processing (MMP) mode for a distribution of analytics workloads over multiple nodes.
• For high available environments, we see a more contained approach with nodepools for each workload type. This requires a significant amount of nodes, usually 8 or more.

Software selection also determines the minimal setup of your environment. When we take Viya 2021.2.5 – at time of writing this blog the latest available release – a deployment of SAS Visual Data Science Decisioning has 49 more pods than a deployment of SAS Visual Analytics. These pods of course need resources, hence a larger software deployment does result in a larger initial footprint.

T-Shirt sizing to start

When we released our new machine types last year, we`ve also introduced our t-shirt sizing recommendations for Viya 4, split between proof-of-concept setups (PoC-Small and PoC-Regular), production recommendations (from XS to XL) and a high available setup;

These t-shirt sizes should help you get started with sizing your environment. Which t-shirt size is right for you highly depends on the size of your datasets and the number of users that will use the environment at the same time. The t-shirt sized setups assume a mixed-use environment, with both visual as well as programming activity but no heavy programming or deep learning activity. Of course, we can still provide a tailored environment to your exact requirements, and we can scale your SaasNow environment on a monthly basis.

Scale when needed

Over time, you may need to scale your SAS environment. This may be incidental for a specific workload, or more permanent when usage of the environment increases over time. We have the following basic guidelines on when to scale which  

• Adding (a lot) more users that use the visual interfaces of SAS Viya, or are you adding a larger software order to your environment? Consider scaling up the supporting services node
• Adding (a lot) more data, or onboarding (a lot) of users that use the programming capabilities of SAS? Consider scaling up the analytics node.

Final words

These guidelines should help you get started with sizing your SAS Viya 4 environment.  As said, these guidelines do not replace a customized sizing by SAS or SaasNow, but should give you an idea on how to size your environment. If you have questions about sizing your environment, feel free to contact us!

References;

• Pricing – Saas Now
• SaasNow introduces new pricing for SAS Viya 4 hosting – Saas Now
• SAS Help Center: Hardware and Resource Requirements

SAS Analytics Pro now available on SaasNow

We have added the option to deploy SAS Analytics Pro to SaasNow!

SAS Analytics Pro is an easy-to-use, yet powerful package for accessing, manipulating, analyzing and presenting information. SAS Analytics Pro combines Base SAS ^® , SAS Studio, SAS/GRAPH^®, and SAS/STAT^® to create an analytics programming environment for data scientists and SAS programmers. The cloud-ready version adds the full SAS ^® Viya ^® set of SAS/ACCESS products, giving you access to many data sources.

Simply create an environment in the SaasNow portal using the new ‘SAS Analytics Pro (BYOL)‘ option and enter your license information.

Pricing is equal to our SAS Viya bring your own license offering, and SAS Analytics Pro can be deployed on any environment size, starting at 4 vCPU. For more information visit our pricing page or contact our sales team!

SAS Visual Analytics for CI360 now available on SaasNow

As an additional feature to the cloud version of SAS Customer Intelligence 360, SAS offers CI360 users the possibility to use SAS Visual Analytics for additional reporting and analysis as well. If you have a SAS Visual Analytics license as an addon to your CI360 environment, you can now use it to start a SAS Visual Analytics environment at SaasNow!

Simply create an environment in the SaasNow portal using the new ‘SAS Visual Analytics for CI360‘ option, upload your license and your environment will be started. As part of the deployment, the CI360 download client is available so you can setup access to your CI360 data in the cloud. You can easily download your detail, dbtReport, snapshot and CDM data to analyze in Visual Analytics.

Pricing is equal to our SAS Viya bring your own license offering. For more information visit our pricing page or contact our sales team!

Viya 2021.2 now available on SaasNow

Last week, SAS released a new LTS and stable version of the Viya platform, versions 2021.2 LTS and 2021.2.1 stable. Amongst other updates, 2021.2 allows you to import jobs from SAS Data Integration Studio to your Viya environment. We are happy to announce that this release is now available on SaasNow. You can deploy your Viya 2021.2 or 2021.2.1 environment through our portal.

Through our portal, you can deploy a SAS environment with your own license. Both Viya 3.5 as well as Viya 4 (version 2020.1 and later) are supported.

For pricing, visit our pricing page or contact our sales team!

SaasNow introduces new pricing for SAS Viya 4 hosting

New Viya 4 instance types available today

September 21, 2021 – SaasNow, part of Notilyze and supplier of hosting-solutions for SAS-platforms, announces new pricing plans for SAS Viya 4. The new hosting options are available right away.

Colin Nugteren, CEO at SaasNow: “Viya 4 introduces a whole new architecture for SAS. We have been running Viya 4 since its initial release, and have been working with SAS customers and partners to give them the best Viya 4 experience at an affordable price point.”

After testing multiple versions of the Viya 4 software, the SaasNow team decided new bundles were better suited to accommodate the specific requirements for SAS Viya 4. Tom Dogger, CTO at SaasNow: “SAS Viya 4 comes with significant optimizations to the memory usage of SAS Viya. For Viya 3.5, we’ve always run extremely high memory configurations per core to give our customers the ultimate performance per licensed core. With Viya 4, SAS moves away from licensing cores, allowing us to add more cores to a single environment”

The new hosting plan for SAS Viya 4 has a new ratio between CPU, RAM and storage. Compared to the Viya 3.5 hosting plans, SaasNow doubles the number of CPUs for each pricing plan. SaasNow can run a SAS Viya environment on a single node, or multiple nodes can be combined into a single SAS Viya environment. The SaasNow team has put together sample environments for different types of organizations to start running Viya in a suitable way.

SaasNow offers Viya 4 hosting to SAS customers and partners in a fully managed setup. Not only infrastructure, but installation, backup, traffic, security and support are also included in a unique monthly model, creating a true SaaS experience for SAS Viya 4.

Viya 4 is available in the SaasNow dedicated European datacenter, located in Amsterdam (The Netherlands), and in multiple Azure regions around the world. New environments can be deployed autonomously in the SaasNow self-service portal, and are available within 2 business days. SaasNow is ISO27001 and NEN7510 certified.

New pricing is available on our pricing page: