Wan Optimization Support

Technical => Features => : Spiffster October 22, 2014, 03:42:39 AM

: Performance with Syncing Autodesk Files
: Spiffster October 22, 2014, 03:42:39 AM
Any idea what performance gains wanos provides for syncing of Revit and AutoCad files? I know this is a big selling point of the Riverbed products. Wan optimization is usually the way to go with Autodesk files because DFS-R and similar technologies tend to cause file corruption as a result of Autodesk's built in file syncing and locking mechanisms. This is the main area where we seek to improve performance.
: Re: Performance with Syncing Autodesk Files
: ahenning October 22, 2014, 07:51:12 AM
Hi Spiffster,

Minor tests based on some files from: http://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/autocad/downloads/caas/downloads/content/autocad-sample-files.html

Gzip test to see whether compression does anything:
tablet.dwg 438656
tablet.dwg.gz 390207
~11% Reduction

Wanos seems to produce similar results:
(http://wanos.co/forum/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=114.0;attach=96)

These files are very small, but it seems compression is not likely to provide better than 10-20% reduction. If we had larger files to work with it would give dedup a chance to attempt to reduce the data as well.

Obviously the reduction is great if the same file is transferred a second time. It would be interesting to see what the reduction is between a previously transferred file and then an edited version. Or is the sync feature built into Autodesk already optimizing this?
: Re: Performance with Syncing Autodesk Files
: ahenning October 22, 2014, 12:04:31 PM
Interestingly the Revit file format seems to be much larger and has different results.

While it hardly responded to compression:
Gzip
30158848 rac_basic_sample_project.rvt
28948755 rac_basic_sample_project.rvt.gz
~4%

It did respond relatively well to a cold dedup transfer:
(http://wanos.co/forum/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=114.0;attach=100;image)



Files retrieved from: http://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/revit-products/learn-explore/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/2014/ENU/Revit/files/GUID-61EF2F22-3A1F-4317-B925-1E85F138BE88-htm.html
: Re: Performance with Syncing Autodesk Files
: Spiffster October 22, 2014, 02:29:01 PM
It is encouraging to see that kind of optimization for a Revit file with even a cold transfer! I can only assume Riverbed claims such a drastic improvement for Autodesk files where the data is already sitting in the local cache. I would guess that wanos will perform similarly unless Riverbed has some kind of specific optimizations for these types of files.
We shall find out once I get a proper test environment up and running.
: Re: Performance with Syncing Autodesk Files
: ahenning October 22, 2014, 03:03:18 PM
It is possible that they have spent quite a bit of time with the files and perhaps even have Autodesk's help as well. For example the protocol might already be compressed to some extent, hence decompressing on the fly and the using the wanop methods to dedup + compress might produce better results.

From this graph it seems Riverbed does about 30% on the Revit data files, which is just a bit less than the Wanos test. I would expect them to be a few percent ahead most of the time, but that's okay.
(http://wanos.co/forum/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=114.0;attach=102;image)


Source: http://images.autodesk.com/adsk/files/strategies_to_speed_collaboration_and_data_management_using_vault_and_riverbed.pdf