"Ins" and "Outs" of Installing and Configuring the SAS® Enterprise BI Server at Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Minnesota

This paper discusses the implementation of SAS Enterprise BI Server at BlueCross BlueShield of Minnesota (BCBSM). It provides an overview of the hardware and software architecture and the deployment of SAS Enterprise BI Server within a mature enterprise-wide and external web-facing infrastructure in a multi-tier UNIX environment. This paper also provides highlights of the installation and configuration process as well as lessons learned from the overall installation and configuration experience from both the SAS and customer point of views. INTRODUCTION BlueCross BlueShield of Minnesota (BCBSM) has committed to SAS Enterprise BI Server (EBI) as its strategic enterprise analytic tool. The corporation’s license for its internal SAS reporting environments (three separate Solaris servers) using SAS8 & SAS9 Foundation Software expired at the end of February, 2006. BCBSM decided to migrate all SAS users and SAS applications from current Solaris UNIX servers to new IBM AIX servers using SAS EBI. Initially, 100 ad-hoc users migrated from the current SAS environment on Solaris. By the end of 2006, there were nearly 200 users ranging from ad-hoc analysts with SAS® Enterprise Guide ® to web users using guided queries via SAS EBI software. Current usage is running between 20-30 concurrent sessions (batch and SAS Enterprise Guide) running queries and/or reports. SAS EBI software is configured as an external, web-facing infrastructure. External Blue Cross customers are granted access to the application through the SAS® Information Delivery Portal to launch reporting content based on their user login id. SAS9 security provides the fine-grain authorization as to what data and reports an individual can access. Hardware requirements were based on the following with the anticipated usage from the external customers: • Up to 900 external customer accounts provided access • Up to 5 defined users for each customer account • Up to total end-user access of 4,500 users with as many as 50 users accessing the system at any one given time Considering the user access volumes, SAS was engaged to assist with sizing the hardware architecture. HARDWARE ARCHITECTURE The hardware architecture is segmented into internal and external access. Internal users consist of BCBSM employees. External users are the customer accounts granted access to the SAS EBI reporting tools. Our configuration management strategy was to set up multiple EBI environments for internal and external access. The server hardware consisted of two IBM P570 servers, allowing the physical server to be divided into logical server partitions (LPARS) for each environment: TEST The test environment is used for development of all EBI content for internal and external users. Access to this environment is granted to the business report developers and the SAS Administrators who manage this environment. 1 SAS Global Forum 2007 Systems Architecture