The concept of networking is very often mentioned within IT, but examples of it do not come up nearly as often in my experience.
However recently I do have such an example. A colleague attended Autodesk University in late 2014, and attended a session regarding file collaboration for products like Autodesk Revit and AutoCAD.
This is an area which I have been struggling with for many years. How does one give LAN-like speed to a single set of data across many geographical locations? I’ve tried many solutions as posted about previously: DFSR, PeerLock, PeerSync, GlobalScape WAFS, Citrix XenApp and others.
And yet all of these have not proven effective enough to permanently rely upon.
But at Autodesk University the session was talking about Panzura. A representative of a company almost exactly like mine was talking about the benefits, and how it has solved the file collaboration problem for them.
When this news was returned I became very excited, and eventually came across this testimonial video: this video is even more evidence that this might be the right path to travel down.
I was put in direct contact with this representative and can now communicate without sales over-exaggerating the benefits of the product.
There is still a large amount of research and testing ahead before Panzura can be seriously considered in my environment, however it is something I would not have seriously considered without the networking.
Hi Jeff
Just curious how you got on with testing Panzura and Revit?
Peter Helps
Warren and Mahoney Architects
New Zealand
Hi Peter, I never actually progressed to a trial of Panzura. The two primary factors in this were price per office, and the lack of Hyper-V support for a virtual controller. According to a webinar that I attended last week, they STILL don’t have Hyper-V support.
I’ve begun taking a closer look at Nasuni lately; while they are more of a full-package service including the cloud storage/connectivity, it seems like a better solution overall.