I need to setup a SolidWorks PDM environment between the US and China on a 256K connection. This speed is to slow for large datasets and would be best served by a replicated or mirrord server on both ends. Does anyone have experience with this from a PDM standpoint?
Thanks in advance.
Bert
P.S., this China thing sucks!
Bert:
Assuming that you are using PDMWorks. First of all, you can't do replication with PDMW -- it just doesn't support it. Replication is when you have two separate installation that constantly sync themselves to each other. I.E. US makes changes, they go to China. China makes changes, they go to US.
One thing you could do, though it's fairly admin-dependent, is just volley the vault back and forth. The PDMW vault is highly portable since it's not a true database. Simply zip it and send it to china, they work on it, zip it, send it back, you work on it, zip it, send it back, and so on. A restart of the vault every day is all you'd probably need.
You might want to have a separate vault for each project though, so that the size of the vault wouldn't be too big for the 256K pipe. The way PDMW is licensed you can do this for free, unless you're using the Advanced Server.
Keep in mind that if you were to try this you CANNOT concurrently work on the vault, as there's no way I know of to merge changes. This means that when China has a copy you CANNOT work on your own copy.
Good Luck.
Todd
don't underestimate the bandwidth of a FedEx envelope full of backup tapes...
If you can live with the latency issues, the easiest thing to do is probably to setup quasi-independant systems on each end, and then shuttle tapes back and forth.
Have an administrator on each end, and swap just the files NAMES of stuff that gets checked out over the 256K line.... Each admin checks stuff out ~simultaneously, and then doesn't check it back in until he receives the updated copy from either the local group, or in a tape from the remote group. Did something like for a multi-state project in the early 90's; it needs detail oriented admins, but it can be made to work.
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