Need help with Civ 3D drawings over the network, will Vault help with this?

[Briggsa]

Hello I posted this in Civ3d Forum but didnt realize there is a vault forum.   I am a Tech for the IT dept for a county and I have been in a uphill battle with our Public Works Department with improving speeds loading projects and drawings over the network.  As it currently stands all the Engineers have powerful Dell Precision T5600 Desktops 3.0 Quad Xeon, 16GB Ram, 500GB SAS drive and 2GB Quadro 4000 with a 1GB link directly to the engineering server, but drawings take forever to Load, and drawings lock up for awhile when saving and the bigger the drawing the longer it takes over all.  So my question is what is the best practice or what are my options to improve loading Cival 3D from a dedicated server?  We tried copying over drawings localy and confirmed the Desktops are not the problem cause everything loads very quickly without a hitch and its not a option to copy and paste over everything they need to do every day of the week.  We have been in the works with the Autocad vender we get the licensing for and they said Vault is the exact product that fixes that issue but the PW dept refuses to try it and i dont know enough about it and hope i could get some insite on weather or not it a good program to use or not and if there is any other options besides vault that offer simular abilities.  I appricate any assistace on this cause as of right now we are out of ideas.

Thanks,

[bpettus]

I'd like to share my experiences with Vault and Civil3d.  We have been using Vault for the past 2 years and like many, were using a traditional server-based storage system beforehand.  Our main reasons for making the transition were:

-Improved organization (missing xrefs are reduced/eliminated by the nature of the software)

-Improved file-security (accessible only to Vault users)

-Version tracking (ability to roll-back files to previous iterations of designs)

-Improved performance (you are working from local drive -always)

I would have to say, that 2 years into the initiative, we have seen great success in all areas.  While there is a substantial learning curve

and fairly involved migration process, the setup is well worth the initial effort. 

We actually use Civil 3d, Autocad, Architecture and 3dsMax Design in conjunction with Vault, along with many Office products, to manage our data.

Our workstations are very similar in spec to what you have mentioned and after moving from a 1GB network server to working essentially locally, we have seen great speed improvements.

When you "check-out" a drawing in Vault, all files including associated xrefs are copied locally, so for the duration of your cad sessions- drawing and saving- you are not hitting the network.  This is especially efficient when dealing with nested xrefs.  Oftentimes the open and save times are not so painful, it is the multiple linked xrefs that cause a major slowdown.  Check-in and open (file retrieval) are the only times that data is transferred back to the Vault server.  Autodesk suggests using a dedicated machine for Vault server installation so other duties are not interfering with the data transfer performance.

I would definitely encourage you to schedule a demo with your Autodesk vendor.  While this is not the solution for everyone, I know of no other package that is so tightly integrated with many of the Autodesk suites- and it is getting better with every version.  The most recent release- 2015- is a marked improvement over 2014 and it seems the trend lately has been to integrate the most-requested features while improving overall stability at the same time.  I'd be happy to share my experiences in greater detail on or off forum,

thanks,

Blake