News

posted on 25 March 2008 08:26

It may not be possible to de-duplicate AutoCAD 2007/2008 files for faster transmission across wide area networks. This problem would affect all de-duping approaches, not just Riverbed's.

It has been noted that Riverbed's wide area data services products do not accelerate the transmission of the latest AutoCAD 2007/2008 files across the WAN, for example, here and here.

Silver Peak's view was that application-aware approaches to wide area data services acceleration are fundamentally flawed by being version-specific. Indeed Rick Tinsley, Silver Peak's president and CEO, said: "Riverbed made its name selling into design firms – where AutoCAD is HUGE. Now, they are abandoning these customers."

Riverbed's Alan Saldich, VP for Product Marketing and Alliances, writes  that asertions made by Tinsley are incorrect; the issue: "affects all products that rely on deduplication - this problem has nothing to do specifically with Riverbed."
 
Contrary to Tinsley's view, that Riverbed is abandoning its customers, Salditch reminds us that Autodesk and Riverbed are jointly working on a solution to the problem and have issued this advice to customers:-

"Users of Riverbed or other affected WAN acceleration solutions can implement the following immediate workarounds that improve write productivity."

1. Using a feature in AutoCAD called “Incremental Save Percentage” (ISP), and setting it to 50
2. Using a version of the DWG format other than the AutoCAD 2007 DWG format."

This is a long. long way from abandoning customers. In fact Riverbed is working hard with Autodesk to get a problem fixed that will probabably benefit all of its competitors who use de-duping approaches to wide area data services as well.

^{[Chris Mellor.]}