TechTarget ANZ, an Australian online news service for IT professionals,
writes today that the users of Riverbed Wide-Area File Sharing (WAFS) hardware who use it to transmit AutoCAD 2008 files between offices have lost much of the advantage of the hardware.
Riverbed technology is in use in some of the largest AEC firms in the world, because when it first came out, it could reduce data traffic between offices by as much as 90%. The hardware scans documents as they pass through the network, and from then on only sends changes, not the entire document. Gensler Architecture, for example, eliminated servers in several remote offices and increased design staff in those same offices, thanks to the increased throughput achieved using Riverbed technology.
The problem is that the file format changed in AutoCAD (again) with the release of AutoCAD 2007. The new version causes files to always look new to Riverbed's data hashing algorithms, making it impossible for the hardware to de-duplicate the file and send only the relevant changed details.
TechTarget ANZ says there is much finger-pointing going on between the R&D staffs of the two organizations.
Read the whole article:
http://searchstorage.techtarget.com.au/news/article.asp?DocID=1303852 --RSN