PDMWorks and remote access 1

[tstanley]

I have read a number of posts regarding PDMWorks, Smarteam etc. including the one by bb007. We are a company with Solidworks being used in a number of locations in the U.S. and Canada by our CNC programmers and plant engineers. Up to now we have not used any data management system for Solidworks but as our product engineering department is starting to use SW, we must start to manage our SW drawings. Our current engineering practice (for 2D drawings) is to have a central server in one location.

My question is what is remote access and how does it work? Is access to the drawing files slow?

Tom Stanley

 

[BSMECAD]

Hi Tom,

You can contact Solidworks to discuss purchasing options for PDMWorks Advanced Server to allow for multisite implementation.

The basic concept of data managment is to have all engineering documentation in one physical location or PDMWorks Vault. One site should be the server site and clients would log into from wherever. They would log in from Canada through PDMWorks via internet and your server would remain online 24/7. They would then save files to your server. The PDMWORKS adminstrator would determine what users or groups have access to what project

Not sure about access time you would need to run tests

 

[PDMAdmin]

Tom,

It is easy to set up PDM clients to access a login server in a different location. However, the network speed will be a critical factor in how useful such an implementation turns out to be. Assuming all the different locations are on the same company network, try setting up one or two clients to access the central server. That way, you can get an assessment of the data access speed. If the network is too slow, not only will the users be frustrated, but PDMWorks will probably stop working because of timeout issues.

 

[alexit]

Multi-site access is very diffcult to implement successfully. Prior to my SW experience I supervised the implementation of a non-SW PDM solution for three sites in three countries. As others mentioned, if there is a centralized datastore the network connection is foremost requirement, if you cannot maintain high enough bandwidth no one will be happy.

Check with the different vendors to see if they have a multiple store implementation available. This is an installation where each site hosts its own vault and administration, but often (very often, I used end of the work day in each country previously) all the servers connect and synch the vault and the administrative portions. The servers also exchange admin data (at least) whenever there was a request for a document that was not found locally...if the doc was present elsewhere, it would be copied to the requesting server first, then to the other(s). This way rarely was there a slow time a user experienced.

 

[StefanHamminga]

A good thing to know may be that by using a VPN connection instead of directly exposing the vault to the internet is that you gain security AND on the fly compression (knowing that solidworks data is usually very compressible that could boost your performance quite a bit!).


Stefan Hamminga
EngIT Solutions
CSWP/Mechanical designer/AI student

 

[PDMAdmin]

In my experience, using PDMWorks through a VPN connection is a bad idea.

thread559-135612

 

[phreaq]

I second PDMAdmin,

vpn is way too slow for SW files. With our current connection (700kbps upload) it takes 140 times longer to open a file thru vpn when compared to an internal connection.

phreaq
Has anyone seen my brain today? (^_^)

http://www.phreaq.net

 

[tstanley]

Thanks everyone. Our Solidworks tech rep will be in tomorrow and we may be able to set up a test shortly with PDMworks.

I gave PDMAmin a star for referring to the thread about VPN. Out of ignorance, I'd missed that one. Regarding alexit's system of having a number of servers, we would have to consider that very carefully since the complications of two people working on the same drawing at different locations are pretty severe. Download speed may dictate that type of solution though.

I would have thought that this problem was common enough that the speed problem would have been resolved by now.

Tom Stanley

 

[pdybeck]

Ask this question over in the SolidWorks discussion forum. I remember discussion concerning some hardware that would help connection speed...

http://www.riverbed.com/

- I believe they referenced the Steelhead units. I don't know much about this, but remember several users at the SolidWorks discussion forum saying this greatly improved their speed. Hope it helps for what its worth.

Pete

 

[SWXVARGURU]

Your best bet when dealing with multi-site PDM implementations is either SmarTeam or DBWorks. PDMWorks is really not designed to be used in a multi-site install.