Help! - Using SolidWorks in Mulitple Locations

Can anyone tell me what it takes to have SolidWorks running in more
than one location and sharing the same data?

The company I work for has 4 Engineers who use SolidWorks. We would
like to have 2 of these guys work at our new building while the other
2 stay at the original location where the server with all of the
drawings is located. The WAN is already in place; each network
connected via T1 VPN.

We've got SolidWorks running on the computers in the new location, but
it's incredibly slow even with our T1 lines. Our average file size is
probably 3 meg, with some as large as 30 meg. Opening a 5 meg drawing
takes 5 minutes or more! Many of the assemblies have hundreds of parts
coming from a multitude of directories, so it's just not feasable to
have the Engineers copy the files, work on them, and then copy them
back.

I believe we need some kind of real-time mirroring software to get the
results we need. That way the files would be local in either location.
They could be checked out, revised, checked back in, and synchronized
with the other location.

Is anybody doing this successfully? We have had some pretty pricey
solutions recommended to us so far, and the last thing I need is to
get cornered into some mega-complicated, super-expensive, proprietary
PDM package that can't even provide us with the simple solution we
need: multisite functionality. Any recommendations would be greatly
appreciated!

Andy Zuhlke
Lab Tech and Network Administrator
Big Joe Mfg. Co.

 

You might check out Conisio. It's a PDM package that would let you lock &
unlock from various locations. It will also let you turn on notification
for changes, etc.

WT

 

Andy,

What your seeing is normal T1 performance, 1.54 mbits per second.

T1 works OK for spread sheets, word doc's, and other small stuff. For multi
megabyte files you need T3 5.4 mbytes per second, big $$$$$$$$.

If you had a way of stripping (al-la ecosqueeze), zipping-unzipping
(transparently) at each end it would help some


Regards

Mark

 

I know it exists, I don't know how well it works, but here's a link to
the web demo. Many people use and like DBworks. Maybe someone who
has the Enterprise edition and uses this feature can chime in.

http://62.101.95.130/mechworks/flash/RemoteAccess/RemoteAccessDemo.htm

Mike

 

Andy,

When SolidWorks opens a drawing it has to open all the files the drawing
references and in some cases it actually modifies those files. Since
SolidWorks only modifies what is in memory the opening process should be
the slowest. However, if you haven't set SW to write it's journal file to
the local drive and it decides to write to a network location over the T1
it will be darn slow and waste some of your precious bandwidth.

I am wondering if, when you say you have a T1, you have all the T1 bandwidth
dedicated to your users? Many places I have been at have all kinds of
things running across their T1, phones, users surfing the web, accounting,
etc., etc. Even so, a full T1 is not going to exceed a 10baseT network. And
a 10baseT network is really slow for running SW the way you do.

You really would be better having users run a local copy. The only "simple"
way you can do that is to upgrade to SW office Pro and use PDMWorks to
allow checkout and checkin so people won't be overwriting each other.

There was a poster on the SW forum named MonsterMaxx who claims to have
gotten his network to be as fast or faster than working locally. If I
recall he was running dual 100BaseT network cards and the server had a
really fast RAID array in it.

If your users are in your complex why not run fiberoptics and use a gigabit
network.

 

Guys, thanks for the suggestions. One of the first things I'll do is
set the journal files to write to the local machines. I didn't even
realize that was possible, so I already learned something here. I
don't expect that to solve our main issue, but every little bit helps!

I took a look at the DBworks demo... Anybody using that? It looks like
exactly what I had in mind, if it does what it says it does - Keeps
the files on the same LAN as the users, and then updates to other
networks when they are done with their modifications. Can somebody
give me an idea of what this costs?

Thanks Again,

AZ

 

IIRC, licenses for each workstation are $500 apiece and an
administrator's license (independent from SolidWorks) is either $200 or
$300. Your mileage may vary, especially if you are not in the US.