PDM - what is the answer?

[engAlright]

My company is now working out of 4 engineering offices in 3 different cities, and there is a significant amount of Solidworks document sharing between all locations. All offices are currently connected through a WAN with "less than optimal" connection speeds for Solidworks-sized documents.

We have been using PDMWorks for about 3 years with decent success, but we are now thinking about moving to a package that will replicate vault data.

2 alternatives are Synergis Adept and ProductCenter. Does anyone have any insight in to either of these packages, particularly as to how they perform when working with multiple replication sites?

I'm also curious about the bumps that might be endured moving the documents from PDMWorks to one of these packages.

Thanks!

 

[macduff]

srm77,
Don't have any experince in Synergis Adept and ProductCenter. Why couldn't you stay with PDMworks and keep your data on a network sever off site with access for everyone to that server? I would hate to see you have to resolve all you links to assemblies and files if you switch to another system.

Just a thought...........

 

[J-C]

I don't believe Adept can replicate data. ProductCenter can but it can be costly($150,000+).

Also look at DbWorks for something more comparably priced to PDM/Works, though the replication ability will require you to get SQL.

Jason Capriotti
ThyssenKrupp Elevator

 

[PDMAdmin]

I have to agree with macduff. If you were trying to share files between three different countries, I could understand the need for vault replication between sites. However, your message made it sound like all three cities are in the USA. (Correct me if I'm wrong about that.) In that case, a single-server approach would work best, assuming your network was of a semi-decent speed and your corporate policies didn't prohibit such access.

 

[engAlright]

Well, our cities are all in Canada but the problems are the same. Network speed issues have prevented us from creating a single vault - we have some pretty large assemblies (2000+ parts, over 1GB total size) that change frequently, making it time consuming to check things in/out of a remote vault.

We are also looking at replicating PDMWorks data in the background to the different servers with an open-source replication tool called RSYNC (recommended by our VAR) - has anyone had any success with this approach?

 

[PDMAdmin]

My company uses RSYNC, but not to copy PDMWorks files. It works fine, but the copying has to be done late at night. Anyone who tries to use the network during that time is in for a shock.

Another possibility that I thought about was Pro/INTRALINK. I can envision a myriad of problems with using SolidWorks files within a PTC database tool, but it's hard to beat Intralink's vault replication abilities.

 

[kcarpenter]

srm77...you might want to have your IT network gurus look at some hardware that will compress the data prior to it being transmitted to the remote offices. As we have just opened an office in China we're experiencing some issues regarding WAN speed with SmarTeam. Thusly our IT dept. is looking at a couple pieces of networking hardware, Tacit and Packeteer. We're going to begin testing these the first of June. But basically you have one of these network devices at each end (or office) and as data is passed to those offices the devices prioritize and compress the data sent. Sounds great, but testing will tell.

There seems to be several software developers who specialize in file/data replication. You should keep a couple things in mind if you do this. It should be real-time, it must be bi-directional (or many-to-many), some offer file compression also. Do a search for "file replication" and you'll see. I found one called from softwarepursuits.com called SureSync. You can try it for free even. I would recommend not replicating the database itself. There are many problems that come from this. I'm guessing you can point the local PDMWorks clients at any directory as the vault, but if you can't file replication is useless.

I can sit here and think of numerous consequences of replication but from my understanding at least of SmarTeam, replication is something of a last resort.


Kevin Carpenter
CAD Systems Specialist
Invacare Corp.

 

[Glonoin]

'Database replication' sounds incredibly appealing in theory, and it scary in practice. For the same reasons you don't try to have two 'live' copies of the same SolidWorks models on two different machines, you don't want to try and have two 'live' copies of the same database in two locations. The theoretical gains are pretty good, but the penalty for synchronization errors is very very bad.

Best alternative I have seen so far is to have multiple 'vaults' or 'storage areas' for your controlled documents, one server local to each workgroup, then a central database controlling access to everything. The remote users still connect over the WAN to the master controlling program / metadata databases but when they go to get files all the files come from a server on their local network. The trick is to 'profile' all your files / assemblies to understand which office needs the fastest access to them and host them on a server local to their network (LAN). The files are not 'replicated' but they are located local to the most appropriate group. If every group needs express access to every one of your files (ie. the files don't belong primarily to a specific location) then ... your mileage may vary.

If PDM/Works will let you configure something like this I suggest trying it - you already have it installed and working so it is effectively a 'free' solution (although you will need a new server at each remote location for the local vaults.) I am not entirely sure that PDM/Works lets you do this, however.

If you cannot get this functionality from what you have, Adept will let you do it exactly as I described.

 

[kcarpenter]

You nailed it Glonion. Central DB with on a single server with many local vaults. Again I'm not familiar with PDMW so the question still remains, can you configure local clients to access a central DB while getting files from local vaults?

Kevin Carpenter
CAD Systems Specialist
Invacare Corp.

 

[J-C]

PDM/Works will not work with the various replication software out there. At least no real-time. The reason is that PDM/Works caches some of the meta data into the server memory and saves it to the vault when needed.

We currently use Availl with no PDM. Results are a bit mixed at this time. We have 3 sites all within 100 miles of each other and the lag for the replication can be pretty bad at times. This is real-time.

Jason Capriotti
ThyssenKrupp Elevator

 

[kcarpenter]

Gil,
Isn't the DB and vault separate? Again I'm not sure about PDMW, but in ST the DB and vault are separate. So even if the DB was caching data to be written, it still has no affect on the vaults. Also, once you check-in an object it immediately leaves your local system and is placed in the vault. At which time the replication software would see a change to the file and send it to the other locations, right?

After more thought on this it seems like this scenario would not be possible in ST because the path to the vault is held in the DB. ST does offer a replication package but is quite costly. Maybe a better answer is to increase the actual bandwidth between locations. Some service providers can prioritize and re-route the traffic to help optimize it for better throughput.

No matter how you slice it there's no great answer I guess.


Kevin Carpenter
CAD Systems Specialist
Invacare Corp.

 

[J-C]

PDM/Works has no DB really, just text files stored in various folder on the server. The text files store the revision, property, revision, etc. info. So the vault contains everything.

The replication software out there will work with it but not in a two-way fashion, meaning you can't have two locations replicating the same vault back and forth with PDM/Works. You might be able to replicate the vault one-way as long as it was read-only for the recipient.

The larger PDM packages usually have built in replication abilities (at a cost). Just the files are replicated, usually overnight or on demand.

Jason Capriotti
ThyssenKrupp Elevator

 

[kcarpenter]

Thanks for the insight Gil. I understand PDMW a little better now.

Kevin Carpenter
CAD Systems Specialist
Invacare Corp.

 

[engAlright]

Sounds like PDMworks doesn't lend itself well to replication, but as with all software, that doesn't mean it can't be done!

The PDMWorks server is caching metadata to RAM while the documents sit in a directory structure - I believe the background data is only touched on check out/check in operations.

I wonder if it would be possible to create a seperate database using the information that is cached in RAM on the server? I suppose this could be done through API by parsing all the .pdmw files in the vault structure, but the data is already in RAM there may be a way to pull the data from there...

 

[PLMGuru]

A great tool for replication is Double-Take from Sunbelt software. Have your IS people check it out, very nice bandwidth management.