Architectural and Engineering Firms Have Headache With File Sharing and Collaboration

Architectural and engineering companies have a headache with file sharing and collaboration as employees often work on large files that, when shared across networks, lose quality and degrade.

This is according to Andrew Mullen, SVP sales and marketing, Talon Storage Solutions, who believes that many solutions redesigned to create efficient file saring and collaboration, but do not offer a high quality user experience.
 
“It’s common for up to 100 architects to collaborate in real-time on a detailed project that includes very large sets of drawings and plans. Data could be sitting thousands of miles away but the team needs to be able to access files as if they were sitting on the LAN. More often than not, firms find the WAN has limited bandwidth and very high latency. This causes big delays and performance bottlenecks, which jeopardizes productivity,” stated Mullen. “More often than not we see a growing number of architectural and engineering firms struggle with their current file sharing solutions as they don’t deliver a 100% user experience. Firms need full-scale branch office consolidation, and performance bottlenecks eliminated, to be able to achieve optimal performance. Many solutions on the market do not have the capabilities to do this.“
 
Mullen continues: “For optimal file sharing performance, solutions should be an integral part of the Windows Server based framework. File Aware Optimization is key to increasing productivity as it accelerates user response time. By acting as an out-of-band file distributed mechanism between the client and the server, and having a detailed understanding of how the SMB/CIFS protocol functions, file-sharing advances can now anticipate user requests. This results in data being retrieved before clients request it – due to the traditionally ‘chatty’ nature of CIFS, the performance improvement is dramatically increased.”
 
Commonly used applications, such as AutoDesk, Revit, Microstation, Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign, are large-scale design files where the data is not easily compressible. This makes it challenging for firms to leverage WAN optimization and replication as it often falls short on performance and end-user productivity.
 
End-to-end distributed locking guarantees file integrity between users to fully benefit from Microsoft and application locking principles. This helps ensure productivity and eliminate loss of data or duplicate files.
 
Mullen concludes: “Having multiple offices across the globe, and working on one project with one set of plans, is now very much a reality for many firms. Technology is catching up with demand, and architectural and engineering firms need to look closely at whether their current infrastructure is up to the job.”