The central component of the architecture for SAS Connector is the Communication component, which is also known as the SPI Server. The SPI Server is a multithreaded TCP/IP listener service. It is installed on the machine that runs SAS and handles requests from the Secure Agent.
When you use the SAS Connector to import SAS objects, the Secure Agent requests the metadata from the SPI Server. The SPI Server starts an SPI session to retrieve the information from SAS and then passes this information to the Secure Agent.
When you run a mapping that contains a SAS source or target, the Secure Agent starts a session with the SPI Server. The SPI Server accesses SAS data and passes it back to the Secure Agent for processing the data.