Irreverence

posted on 15 May 2008 16:48

According to a person familiar with the situation Autodesk had very good reasons for altering its file format and file writing process in the latst version of AutoCAD.

However this meant that every fresh version of an AutoCAD 2007 DWG file was different which defeated the deduplication technologies, such as Riverbed's, looking for commonalities between successive versions of saved AutoCAD files.

Apparently Riverbed encouraged AutoCAD customers experiencing greatly reduced Steelhead appliance acceleration to write out AutoCAD trouble tickets and thus bring Autodesk into the problem. This greatly irritated Autodesk as it was not an AutoCAD problem at all but a particular WADS (Wide Area Data Services) deduplication technology problem.

A fix is being looked at by AutoDesk but the implication is that AutoCAD file opening and writing will be less efficient if the file and file writing formats have to be alterted to help the deduplicaters.

^{[Chris Mellor.]}