SAS IO CHARACTERISTICS
It is important to note, SAS has different IO characteristics than many OLTP related applications. For example, SAS differs from a traditional relational database in that instead of a very high number of small IO requests, SAS typically employs a smaller number of very large IO requests. Instead of being concerned about the number of requests-per-second we can sustain, we are concerned about the IO throughput rate for large data volumes being processed.