Office to Office autocad file sharing

[ThePatHammon]

I have been tasked with finding a solution to increase AutoCAD file sharing efficiency between my company's main office and several satellite offices.

as i understand ii now currently the main office has the only server, all AutoCAD files are hosted locally in our building. we run off a cable connection with 50mbps down and only 5mbps down. sadly it seems as though this is the best we can get

all the workers in the satellite offices simply connect directly to our server in the home office, they have no local servers. i think they all have pretty similar cable connections

we have about 15 designers in the main office and none of the satellite offices have any more than 6.

The files we work with can sometimes be several hundred megabytes.

A couple possible solutions I'm looking at is to have local severs setup in the larger satellite offices and maybe some "riverbed" technology that I read people were having good luck with on this forum.

any tips, ideas or personal experiences that you could share would enormously helpful.

Cost is a definate concern, but I think we're willing to spend the money if the performance increase is substantial enough

[pendean · Accepted solution]

Without the proper high bandwidth (up and down speeds) at everyone's locations, remote access will remain a pain for all remote users involved.

some good articles to read while you wait:
http://blog.stephendolphin.co.uk/project-work/why-i-chose-a-bandwidth-upgrade-and-not-riverbed/
http://www.jk-47.com/2012/10/real-dedupecost-savings-results-from-a-riverbed-whitewater/
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/greenfield/riverbed-granite-enterprise-riches-or-fools-gold/741
http://www.infoworld.com/d/networking/review-riverbed-closes-the-wan-gap-193595
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2044407/riverbeds-updated-granite-to-bring-more-power-to-branch-sites...

[scot-65]

Look into virtual mode (VDI).
Basically it's the satellite location(s) hooking directly to the server that has a copy of AutoCAD installed. Speed is increased at the cost of a sluggish cursor.

[mathewkol]

Citrix is the virtual environment supported by Autodesk. I've seen pretty good results with it.

[rkmcswain]

FWIW - We used the riverbed steelheads years ago when our WAN speeds were limited and they helped tremendously. We could not operate without them at the time.