Maintaining sync NAS, Azure & remote work & other integrations
Hi folks,
Somewhat new to the admin-side of Autodesk stacks, so please bear with me.
I'm competently comfortable with IC Systems architecture, but my knowledge of what folks do inside the apps is a little light; I care how my charges use tech, not the actual data. (data's just data as far as I'm concerned)
This is a relatively greenfields setup spun up on a shoestring, but we're coming up on the limits of that budget (or lack thereof), and so scaling up & out a bit.
Up to this point & between phases of our local COVID lock-downs, the practice has been mostly OK using Google drive, but that's not appropriate anymore. (long story)
There's now momentum to get set up better & with a little more deliberate forethought & planning so that the tech stack capacity & capability can grow as resources allow.
Besides budgets, there are other constraints in play, including unpredictably random periods of imposed remote-work and general spotty connectivity.
That being said, what we have now:
- maxed-out Synology DS920+
- 4x 8GB Ironwolf in a RAID5 config
- Btrfs (RAID-Z not an option just yet)
- 2x NVMe for cache acceleration
- as much RAM as it could handle
- 4x 8GB Ironwolf in a RAID5 config
- LACP onto LAN
- dialed down 'apps' & /dev/null'd some 'cloud' vulns
- Making perioding snapshots of work-product
- In the process of pulling/syncing-down current corpus of cloud work of the users for local backup & archiving completed work
- Automated backup to external (eSATA) & encrypted remote backup (BackBlaze).
- (this effectively uses rclone on the backend)
Users seem to be using Revit 2020-22, but not making use of BIM Collaborate due to costs.
Presently still using G'Apps/suite on the collaboration & doc-side, but moving to o365/Sharepoint/Azure stack, as that's what the majority of clients are communicating with us with, and offers a number of benefits in order to consolidate functionality fragmented across other solutions or integrations/automations where possible.
Will probably be using Azure-AD for GPO, etc.
VPN connectivity is pretty stable, with Central syncing seeming to perform OK so far.
Given the above...:
I'd like to find or develop a good remote-local-cloud hybrid model to make the process more seamless & scalable.
Ensure that the authoritative "A Single Source of Truth" (SSoT?) be the in-house NAS, and ensure sync is managed & maintained across various platforms.
In particular, I'd like to figure out some sort of mechanism that would maintain the current dataset of the active projects across nodes, so I need a means of ensuring that BIM data is safeguarded for those users that get licences/subscriptions.
Either syncing BIM with Azure/SP/o365 or with the NAS.
I'm able to spin up a Docker container to host an agent on the NAS, or some other service/app on o365 I can sync with.
Alternatively/additionally, some sort of client-side agent that will maintain a local cached copy of the remote works so that a current copy is always current & available & the principal (central?) dataset is kept updated with changes, rather than users having to constantly pause to sync & disrupt their momentum & flow.
If there's some sort of version-control I can hook into a GIT server (local or hosted), that'll be pretty cool.
Until there's a clear & deliberate need or benefit to fork out for additional Autodesk tech (I'm sure it'll arise) we'd like to make use of the very extensive MS solutions already available to us, which will replicate some of this tech being upsold.
(Guessing that's where Forge API comes in handy)
