DWF across the WAN

[damienrange]

My company has two offices located several hundred miles apart. The offices are relatively small in size, with 10 employees in one site, and about 15 in the other. Both sites are using the same version of AutoCAD.

Is there any product that can enable both the sites to work from a single server, or would a Distributed File System (DFS) be a better option? I'm mainly concerned about the File Locks and the Reference Files, if using the DFS solution.

Is there a Document Management product available for AutoCAD?

I have both sites currently connected by T1s and a VPN.

Your help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks ,
Damien

[garyparker84]

Damien,

You can stay on Autodesk technology and use Autodesk Vault or Productstream for document management.

Best,
Gary

[adam46smith]

You say you have a VPN. Is that the only connection point between the two offices?

A.Smith

[garyparker84]

If using the DFS with Riverbed Steelhead and DocuVault the way to go then?

Do you have 1st hand experience with this combination?

[adam46smith]

Vault is a Document Manager for Autodesk products. There are other choices, (Adept, Columbus, Projectwise, etc) which may have significant advantages in some environments.

In as much as Vault is not a profit center for Autodesk, I'm seeing little effort being put into making it a quality EDMS (Electronic Document Management System) for AutoCAD.

[adam46smith]

Take a look at the Riverbed Steelhead products.

We've got Steelheads and they're good to a point, but with the advent of the new drawing format in R2007/2008 they can no longer transfer just the changed bits of a file, the way it worked with earlier AutoCAD versions. If you save or open a 2007/2008 file over the WAN that has changes, there is no acceleration. They're still good for other file optimization, email, etc.

[garyparker84]

I do agree for these appliances. One of our partners implemented Steelheads some time back. They told that the product was incredibly simple to install, and demonstrated efficient bandwidth results and latency improvements.

[damienrange]

Since the market review is demonstrating irrefutable response for Riverbed's Steelhead Appliances, we are looking forward to deploy that

Rather, their team is already being called upon for demo.

[Hack]

So, does this mean that your question has been answered to your satisfaction?

[damienrange]

Since we have just deployed these appliances, lets see what performances they will be showing and which areas will be covered and to what extent.

[damienrange]

Since the Steelheads are now in, a far reaching impact is observed by remote users on application performance. Its now clear that upgrading the bandwidth to remote locations has little or no impact on application performance.

We no longer need to maintain IT infrastructure at all our many offices worldwide.

[garyparker84]

Steelheads are performing fairly well. They help in enabling reliable and regular complete network-based backup without interfering with other applications that require the WAN.They are proving themselves to be the leader in network acceleration.

[adam46smith]

Your approach is correct.

We have already experienced that with the increased number of users, WAN performance starts crawling. Before Steelheads, it used to take one hour or more to deliver critical information from one site to another. The WAN links continued to be saturated most of the time; application performance suffered, and employee morale affected adversely. They became impatient and frustrated. As a result, overall productivity was affecting.

[headen]

With Distributed File System (DFS), system administrators can make it easy for users to access and manage files that are physically distributed across a network. With DFS, you can make files distributed across multiple servers appear to users as if they reside in one place on the network. Users no longer need to know and specify the actual physical location of files in order to access them.