AutoCAD is the industry-standard design application for many architectural, engineering and construction (AEC) firms around the world, but with file sizes exceeding hundreds of megabytes in size on larger projects, accelerating network performance has become a business-critical strategic requirement.

Sharing AutoCAD files is a common network bottleneck for firms with multiple offices or large field teams. Without acceleration, tasks as simple as opening and closing files can take upwards of an hour over a wide area network (WAN), impacting productivity and overall time-to-market for customers, and ultimately, delivery to the client.

In the past, caching technology was used with limited success to accelerate the transfer of files over the WAN, but this technology is hardly ideal for complex, dynamic files from software packages like AutoCAD. What’s required for true optimisation is acceleration technology that natively supports AutoCAD files, coupled with more advanced network traffic acceleration hardware.

The Steelhead advantage

Riverbed pioneered WAN optimisation and for several years now has refined its Steelhead® network appliances to natively support AutoCAD data over the WAN. Today, Steelhead acceleration for AutoCAD returns up to seven times the performance over conventional acceleration methods, even when compared to other dedicated acceleration methods.

With optimised support for AutoCAD 2014, Steelhead appliances can also cut WAN bandwidth consumption by up to 97%. By dramatically accelerating the performance of AutoCAD over the WAN, distributed design and manufacturing firms can quickly access large files for the design and development of new projects, resulting in real-time collaboration for employees in multi-site environments.

Deploying Steelhead appliances can greatly reduce the amount of time required to open, save and transfer AutoCAD files across the WAN, giving users LAN-like access speeds and improving the collaboration and productivity of design teams. This gives firms the opportunity to source people on projects regardless of their location, and enables real-time collaboration on designs across distributed teams.

The ‘secret sauce’ that delivers this level of performance is dubbed Riverbed Optimisation System (RiOS), and provides data de-duplication, compression, transport layer and application protocol optimisation for all network traffic between Steelhead appliances. When applied to AutoCAD acceleration, this helps AEC firms achieve:

· Productivity gains, by dramatically reducing the amount of time needed to complete basic CAD file operations.

· Reduced bandwidth utilisation from remote offices that rely on accessing CAD documents located on networked file servers in other offices, reducing IT costs.

· Better, faster collaboration that enables users in multiple offices to work collaboratively on large design documents. Work can be shifted to offices with downtime, or the right person can work on a task regardless of their location.

· Remote office server consolidation so that server consolidation becomes a reality, and remote IT infrastructure can be reduced or eliminated. IT maintenance costs can be reduced, and the tasks of upgrading and patching servers can be greatly simplified.

How it works

RiOS was created to solve application acceleration challenges in a very different way than caches. Caching was created as protocol-specific architecture, essentially only dealing with data in the ‘application silo’ that they understand. RiOS, on the other hand, accelerates applications on three levels simultaneously:

· Data streamlining: data reduction for all TCP applications.

· Transport streamlining: TCP optimisations for all applications.

· Application streamlining: application-specific optimisations.

Each of these technologies co-exists independently in RiOS, meaning that all enterprise applications can benefit from data reduction and transport layer acceleration.

Application layer acceleration is treated as one piece of the puzzle in this architecture, while in the caching architecture it is a requirement that the cache understand the application protocol in order to return any meaningful benefit.

Application-independent optimisation in RiOS means that email, file sharing, document management, ERP applications, CAD drawings, network-based backup, software distribution, web-based applications, and even custom-built applications see benefits. The system is designed to intelligently accelerate applications without the management problems that caches have introduced in today’s networks.

Optimisation in practice

Consider the illustrated example below that depicts a typical distributed AutoCAD deployment. With this architecture, all modifications to AutoCAD drawings go through the WAN before being saved at the centrally located file server.

On the left is a branch office (or remote site) with users running AutoCAD on laptops or desktop PCs. Steelhead appliances sit on either side of the WAN link, optimising connections back to a centrally located file server. The centrally located file server stores all the AutoCAD Drawing (.dwg) files.

Figure 1. Typical Steelhead and AutoCAD 2014 topology

Steelhead appliances use a multi-tiered optimisation approach that yields significant performance gains for AutoCAD 2014. They employ a unique data reduction algorithm and transport layer optimisation to provide a foundation for acceleration of all AutoCAD network traffic.

The graph below compares cold file save performance (i.e. saving a file over the WAN for the first time) with and without Steelhead at both 0% and 50% incremental save percentages.

Figure 2. Cold save performance (AutoCAD 2014)

 

  

Rather than writing out the entire file during a save, incremental save is a feature of AutoCAD that forces the software to only write portions that have changed at an object level. This eventually results in file ‘bloat’ as portions of the file are marked as deleted rather than actually removed from the file.Setting the incremental save percentage controls how much ‘bloat’ there can be – a default value of 50 means that incremental saves will be performed until the modifications in the drawing exceed 50% of the original drawing size. At this point a full save is performed.

Steelhead appliances reduce the time taken for a warm save (a file saved for a second or consequent time over the WAN) by about half when using a 50% incremental save; and saves when using 0 per cent incremental save percentage go up to six times faster.

Figure 3. Warm save performance (AutoCAD 2014)

 

 

Mixed save performance (the most common AutoCAD operation, when the AutoCAD drawing file is saved over the WAN after it has been modified) is charted below.

Figure 4. Mixed save performance (AutoCAD 2014)

 

 

Using the recommended settings in each case, save time is reduced by a third and the bandwidth consumed is reduced by over 80%. With incremental saves, the entire file will eventually have to be written across the WAN, but even this operation is optimised, taking a third less time and a fraction of the bandwidth.   

Off the charts

The race to win new business and remain competitive in an increasingly global workspace continues apace. As such, large AEC firms will inevitably hit bottlenecks in their operation that require specialised solutions to solve.

But while the figures speak for themselves, the real value of WAN acceleration depends very much on how users store and retrieve information, and the return on investment largely depends on how often users take advantage of the acceleration in their everyday tasks.

With usage statistics confirming the increasing importance of AutoCAD in these environments, chances are that more firms are likely to see the benefit of WAN acceleration for AutoCAD, and few solutions offer returns as consistent as Riverbed’s Steelhead.