It makes our file system sharing a lot easier, even across different continents. We have had file systems shared across different continents with no performance degradation. In this sense, it has helped us. 

• Keeps the SAS people happy.
• Keeps SAS running.
• Allows us to share files across multiple environments: Unix and Windows.
• Managing the environments outside of the high availability cluster has been huge. This pulls one more factor out of the clusters that we do not have to manage.

We need the CPU power to do all of our work. You can't do it on just one node. You need multiple nodes. That is what makes it beneficial. It provides more power. We have thousands of users. They need bandwidth to be able to do everything. If they do not have it, they can't run.

We use it primarily in our SAP organization. It allows us to have a centralized location where we can put our files and distribute them among different applications.