One of the major applications
we use the most is AutoCAD. We want to enable all our data in our main
office, and all the employees in the branch offices work in real time
over the WAN links. We want to upgrade, as all our projects are the
product of work progressed by employees physically located in all five
of our offices.Any experiences with real live production happening over the WAN using C3D or Revit?Thanks in advance.

Revit may depend more on the reliability and capacity of your WAN links. Civil 3D shares data on the file level, Revit on the workset (object) level.
 
But with adequately "thick" WAN lines you can use both AutoCAD Civil 3D and Revit in the same way as on LAN (which is used very often).

I also work in an AutoCAD
(currently using 2005) environment. I was wondering how people are dealing
with the Revit issues? My users complain of how slow Revit is over the
link.

Working on similar Applications.

You must look for some WAN optimization kit to solve the issues.

Do you want to say that I must have adequate "thick" WAN lines? or what...?

Are you using T1 line(point to point T1, no firewall in between) or what?If
so,then I must tell you that T1 line is very slower than your LAN even
that has impact on your application performance. If you really need to
run files 'live' over the T1, you definitely need to go for some
WAN-optimization kit.

If you really need to speed things up, you might want to go for T3 (44Mbps). Not sure of the cost difference, but time is money.

The
DS3 is the data carried on a T3 circuit. As far as cost to access is
concerned, the price calculation has two distance steps: geomapping and
the determination of local price arrangements. We need to figure out
the time we will be using these carrier lines in order to manage costs.

Please be aware that increasing the 'pipe' size will not necessarily
give the performance boost you are looking for. It will heavily depend
on the physical distance between the two sites. Distance is the main
contributer to latency (or network delay).

The greater the delay, the more likely that a WAN link will be limited
in real throughput not by the pipe size - at which point bigger pipes
will make NO difference to a single users experience. This is not to
say that bigger pipes are not useful, particularly when you need more
users using that link at the same time.

And this leads to WAN optimizers, there primary purpose being to
significantly reduce the effect of latency and also reduce the data
traveling over the link.

Revit over the network is slow in terms of opening the model.

After that its speed is the same at all desktops...
If one or two users are in the model - speed is ok...

But more than 2 - speed becomes a crawl...
whether the model resides in the same office or over the network...

Many firms have used the Riverbed network acceleration hardware when
they have offices in multiple locations. Do anybody out here has had
first hand experience with these products?

There are
various WAFS and caching appliance and software-based solutions which work very
well for other applications as well, for example Steelhead from Riverbed, the
Tacit Networks appliance, and Availl software. While work sharing, Revit is
constantly checking to make sure items are not being edited by others, and
locking items when you edit them. If the network is slow, Revit will be slow.

We did first test over our standard T3 WAN using a 110mb
project file. Working directly in the Central file over the WAN was impossible.
Saving to central, required upwards of 30 minutes.
The second test was performed after Riverbed appliances
were connected between three of our offices. The same file was usable and
saving to central was reduced to several minutes.

Revit does work over a wan, but it is indeed very slow.
The Riverbed appliance is the best bet right now.


charlesbentt2008-02-08 09:04:15

Some Revit
users are using Riverbed WAN software/hardware solutions:

 

http://www.riverbed.com/solutions/accelerate/cad_apps.php

 

It's
not cheap, but if you workflow requires working on the same file from multiple
offices; it may be worth it to you. Short of speeding up the WAN, I think I
would have each office working on a separate file that is linked into the files
of the other offices.

Some people do the VPN / Remote Desktop approach
instead of the Riverbeds.

They setup cheap headless desktop units in the main office that remote users
can log into and work from, so that Revit is on the LAN all the time. With a
decent VPN / Remote Desktop setup its workable.

The Riverbed stuff is awesome, if not cheap.

The Riverbed devices
offer pretty much the best performance, especially for MS Windows environments.
They will improve the performance for Revit users. You do need to start with a
decent network (as in LAN). And also worth noting, they can never offer the
same performance as those on the same LAN experience, but they can move it much
closer. For smaller files and office type docs, this is often insignificant -
but for larger CAD files, you will still notice it.My suggestion is to get some in for a trial.

The technology you guys need to consider in your environments is Riverbed's Steelheads.    These WAN acceleration appliances go on either end of your WAN links (T1 or VPN typically), and basically give performance nearly as fast as a local area networks gives.  We have been using this
technology for 4 years now, and it has enabled us to have a 99% central data model, including our AutoCAD.  Civil3D works very well with this.  (Land Desktop did not work very well with it, (MDB files don't work well.))  We do not use Revit.   See http://www.riverbed.com AND  http://www.ray.sirois.com for more information.
 
 
 raysirois2008-02-26 20:18:54

 
 
http://aec.cadalyst.com/aec/article/articleDetail.jsp?id=353654


 
We have been using Riverbed Steelhead appliances for 4 years to solve the problems you guys are chatting about.  Good article above.
 
http://www.ray.sirois.com
 
 

You
are very right raysirois. Let me share our experience too.We
have a small company with two locations. Working with Revit worksharing used to
be so slow that it was not possible for us before we upgraded to a set of
Riverbed boxes (WAN acceleration devices).We have a relatively slow line 2mbit in and 512 MB out, and thought about
getting a city to city dedicated line, which would probably solve our problems.
But the price per month was outrageous.One of the Revit gurus in Autodesk recommended Riverbed. It worked, and the
guys at Riverbed have been absolutely fantastic and helpful in setting it all
up for us over the phone/email. The boxes were expensive but the performance
was outrageous.


We had a huge Revit file of about 100 MB, which took 30 minutes before the
boxes were set up. After the boxes were installed it uploaded in something like
20 seconds. The first time you transfer something over it takes a long time,
then the second time it transfers really fast.Hope it helps.

We have Riverbeds in all our
offices. We did our benchmarking well over a year, and it was definitely worth
the expense. We just recently added the Steelheads (Riverbed) Mobile Software
to our laptop users. I went from Save To Central times in excess of an hour
down to 10 minutes connecting from a hotel with VPN. I have had the Steelhead
Mobile for maybe 3 months and I now wouldn't work without it.

The reviews for Riverbed are
positive from all sides. We had a test trial and found that it addressed all
the issues that we were facing, in terms of application acceleration, bandwidth
savings and usability; especially sharing large graphic and design files (Revit
Files).Looking forward to get these products
in, in the coming time.