Do you lie awake at night wondering about the possibilities of accessing your data from anywhere via the cloud? Me neither, but perhaps you trudge off to work, boot your computer and start working in a system that is completly dependent on the 10 year old, onsite PDM server… that also serves as the print server and file server. Our good pal, Lou Gallo of SolidWorks Heard explores an alternative to serving up files from your local PDM vault and shows you, in just a few step, how he set up SolidWorks EPDM on Windows Azure.
Deploying EPDM on Windows Azure
More and more options for offsite, or cloud, servers are becoming available. Butch Lively, who sent me Lou’s story, handles CAD administration for TDA Aviation, where I saw EPDM functioning on an offsite server. Years ago, they approached Rackspace about deploying EPDM on their servers. They had never done it but where willing to try. TDA has successfully served up files from the cloud ever since. So, maybe you’re wondering how you can deploy or at least test an EPDM setup on the cloud, what works and what doesn’t work. Lou explains:
I tested if this SQL service would support all the same features as the on-premises version. After further research, this was more of a service to power database applications and does not support stored procedures and other requirements needed for the vault creation wizard (SA access or db_owner access)… So despite wanting to use the hosted SQL platform, I had to resort to utilizing a local instance of SQL on a Windows Azure virtual machine. The saving grace to using the Windows Azure VM is that you can literally deploy an instance in about 2 minutes with SQL already installed and setup.
Lou goes on to provide a few visuals of the setup and warns that it doesn’t address encryption and you have three months to test it out. You’ll also want to listen to his podcast where he did describing the process. Do you run your EPDM install from the cloud? What has your experience been?
