hope this helps!

hope this helps!

Engineer 1 will have the assy (read only) open and when I try to open a subset it will tell me it cannot find the file?

Engineer 1 will have the assy (read only) open and when I try to open a subset it will tell me it cannot find the file?

It’s a good idea to have all your controlled files on a protected network location. It’s not a good idea to read a lot of file data across the network. That’s what’s gonna slow stuff down. I think you would definitely benefit from SyncBack or equivalent to get a copy of your files on your local drive so your models load faster. We have it set up to sync every night and we can sync manually whenever we need to.

Disk space on my local drive hasn’t been a problem. (Only 40GB of SolidWorks files on a 100GB drive in the past 4 years) and you can archive when necessary. It does require regular defragmentation, but that should be a regular activity anyway.

We keep all our files on a network that gets backed up every night to tape. Would syncback make life easier? We certainly have the slow loading issues, we share the toolbox on the network, I read somewhere that was a good idea…..is it crap?

You have pretty much confirmed my questions.

Our current practices do not move model files to and from the share area. The transfer is directly from the vault to the local hard drive. The share area does contain the shared SolidWorks data – toolbox, templates, library parts. Again, it any of these items are needed, they are transfered directly from the share to the local hard drive.

Your indications are that eliminating the working files on the local hard drives in leu of a single common place on the network would slow performance due to the additional network traffic. That was my “gut feel” but wanted it confirmed. Thanks.

We do our own in-house IT so modifications to the system are an option.

Thanks everyone for your input on the subject.

-dch

Do you handle your own IT or contract it? You may want to discuss a more robust system for handling large data transfers. speed, distributed file systems (DFS), defragmentation and maintenance, local file sync, battery back-ups, sql database are just some of the things we’ve had to discuss with when using SolidWorks.

You have pretty much confirmed my questions.

Our current practices do not move model files to and from the share area. The transfer is directly from the vault to the local hard drive. The share area does contain the shared SolidWorks data – toolbox, templates, library parts. Again, it any of these items are needed, they are transfered directly from the share to the local hard drive.

Your indications are that eliminating the working files on the local hard drives in leu of a single common place on the network would slow performance due to the additional network traffic. That was my “gut feel” but wanted it confirmed. Thanks.

We do our own in-house IT so modifications to the system are an option.

Thanks everyone for your input on the subject.

-dch

Here is a little additional info about our particular setup:

We have four seats of SolidWorks.

Our licenses are served from a server that contains the license servers for all our products and the PDMWorks Vault.

We have a large disk array mounted to another server that acts as our Share area.

We have additional physical servers dedicated to Mail, DNS/Gateways/Internet, phone, security, etc.

So we really only have two servers that interact with our CAD efforts – the license / vault server and the share area server. Those two machines don’t do much else.

We develop flight simulators for the government. Our models currently have 600-700 unique parts and toolbox parts on top of that.

PDMWorks manages ownership and currency of each file. It works well enough for our operation.

Each user checks out what they need to their local hard drive and then checks it back in to the vault when done. If user A saves changes to the copy on his hard drive, the Vault monitors that and lets all the other users know that they are not working with the current version.

We do have multiple copies on the verious workstations hard drives, but the Vault software takes care of the communications part.

I am just wondering if I move all of this to a common network cache area if I am trading in the multple copies (not currently a workflow problem) for reduced performance due to the additional network loads.

Thanks again for your thoughts.

-dch

If hardcore team collaboration is needed, I would suggest having a server specifically with that. Again, easy to do with something like Syncback, but may have to approach it differently with a Vault-based PDM system like PDMWorks.

Any tips Jeff?

When reading the article, my first thought about using a centralized network cache was that network traffic/bandwidth might be an issue. Jeff, thanks for your comments on that subject.

We have fairly new workstations, but our network is a little dated. It is still a 10/100 based system. Gigabit networking with a managed switch and large packets is still 6 months to 1 year out for us.

When we check something out of the vault, it has to travel over the network to the workstations. Our vault is on one physical server (server02) and our general share area is on another physical server (server12). From an organizational view, we would like to put the network cache area on server12 – all the users have permissions for the share area. But does that mean moving the data over the network twice – PDM Vault on server02 to network cache on server 12, then file manipulation between cache/server12 and the individual workstations?

Moving the network cache to server02 would remove one of the network transfers. But what advantage would I see over our current setup? The PDM software already keeps track of who is doing what updates. I understand that the network cache ensures each user is updated with the latest, but that can be accomplished with work practices of checking for updates from the vault.

Now it is your turn to tell me what I am missing.

Thanks for your help.

-dch

The ideal solution? That would be if SolidWorks cached files locally and added a collaboration option to update referenced cached files. It would take away the manual reloading and move the workspace off the server.

Glad ya mentioned the Reload command. It comes in handy, but goes back to that ‘did you check it in yet?’ head-popping-up routine. Granted we need some exercise with all the sitting behind computers all day, but automating even that can help.

When reading the article, my first thought about using a centralized network cache was that network traffic/bandwidth might be an issue. Jeff, thanks for your comments on that subject.

We have fairly new workstations, but our network is a little dated. It is still a 10/100 based system. Gigabit networking with a managed switch and large packets is still 6 months to 1 year out for us.

When we check something out of the vault, it has to travel over the network to the workstations. Our vault is on one physical server (server02) and our general share area is on another physical server (server12). From an organizational view, we would like to put the network cache area on server12 – all the users have permissions for the share area. But does that mean moving the data over the network twice – PDM Vault on server02 to network cache on server 12, then file manipulation between cache/server12 and the individual workstations?

Moving the network cache to server02 would remove one of the network transfers. But what advantage would I see over our current setup? The PDM software already keeps track of who is doing what updates. I understand that the network cache ensures each user is updated with the latest, but that can be accomplished with work practices of checking for updates from the vault.

Now it is your turn to tell me what I am missing.

Thanks for your help.

-dch