Vault Professional Business Continuity Issues due to ownership

[aclinch]

Hi All,

I'm after advice regarding business continuity in a Vault Professional 2012 full replication environment.

In my organization we have a Publisher and several subscribers all geographically remote.  The database replicates close enough to real time, and the filestore replicates overnight with each subscriber having a complete copy of the filestore.   All work is done on the subscribers, and the sites assist each other, so ownership can be scattered.  Each user logs onto their local subscriber.

All is working well, except in a business continuity scenario when a subscriber is offline for an extended period.

The scenario is that although each site has a copy of the drawings or documents, if the site "owning" the drawing is offline (or not visible to the other servers) then it cannot release documents/drawings to be worked on from an alternate subscriber.

I've investigated using Professional 2013, but the improvements simply automate the manual process of requesting leases, etc, but the underlying isssue seems to still be there.

Any ideas on how to get around this? 

Thanks in advance.

[mbodnar]

Hi

I don't believe that there is any workaround in 2013 for this scenario. I hope Autodesk consider enhancing this in the near future.

Regards

Max Bodnar

[aclinch]

Thanks Max,

You're confirming my fears.

I believe it a serious issue that could be circumvented.

If MS SQL can't handle it natively, then I'm sure a carefully crafted script would suffice (with appropriate associated controls, permissions, and configurations in place of course). 

Thanks again.

Regards,

Andrew Clinch

[minkd]

The ownership is there in order to prevent divergence between workgroups. If you attempt some unsupported means to force the ownership and divergence occurs, the subscriber (and any changes made on the subscriber that were not replicated) would be lost.

If losing the subscriber is acceptable, then a better approach would be to remove that workgroup with the ADMS-Console. This will allow ownership to be taken by the remaining subscribers or the publisher; but you will have rebuild the subscriber if/when you want it back.

Assuming you don't want to lose the subscriber, IMHO, the right thing to do is to work to get the subscriber back online rather than try to circumvent ownership and risk losing the subscriber altogether.

-Dave

[aclinch]

Thanks Dave,

I agree with you regarding unsupported scripts and have no intent of progressing down that path without Autodesk direction to do so.

Will investigate the implications of removing the workgroup via the ADMS console.

For us, the beauty of full replication was three fold:

1. Minimizing impact on the network during busy periods

2. Maximizing performance for users local to the subscriber server/s 

3. Maintaining business continuity during a subscriber failure by taking advantage of data replicated to multiple sites. 

Unfortunately, in the way permissions work within Vault, point 3 is ineffective in this architecture.

I am still hoping this shortcoming is addressed in a future version of Vault Professional.

Thanks for your feedback, much appreciated

Andrew Clinch