AutoCAD LT .... Egnyte, Vault, or in-house?

[thecomputerguy]

Got a client using AutoCAD with 7 designers and the have been having issues for awhile because they are storing all their drawings on Dropbox and it's creating conflicted copy's everywhere and not syncing properly, and designers are opening the same drawing and overwriting each other, drawings are getting damaged.... It's a nightmare, mainly because there is no file lockout.

Client is currently paying Dropbox $2600 per year for 15 users. Dropbox is an incorrect product for this application.

My plan is to split their data between whatever new location we choose, and O365 Teams/SP for all the other stuff that isn't AutoCAD (Word, Excel, PDF etc.) then dump Dropbox.

They currently use remote access software because they are too cheap to supply their employees with decent Laptops to work from home.

So, in my research

Egnyte:
Egnyte keeps coming up as a somewhat affordable option. I assume this is to be used with their Cloud Drive App which allows you to Map a Drive letter to your shared data directly so there is no syncing going on.

- This keeps us cloud based at a reasonable cost, and adds a mapped drive for file lockout

$3600 per year for 10 users & 2TB storage

Autodesk Vault:
Not much research here, looks to be very expensive at around $10k per year, and probably more than what they need but I'm open to suggestions

Dell Server:
Move back to an in-house Dell Server running 2022 with as much local storage as we can afford for a one-time cost of $8k-$10k. Probably the worst option.
-Also this makes us go backwards into having to store and maintain physical hardware.

Synology NAS + VPN:
Does a NAS work well in this application with AutoCAD? I know I can build out a pretty beefy NAS with 20TB of storage for a relatively cheap one-time cost then VPN them into the network and Map a Drive. They would probably need to upgrade their internet as they are on something like a 50down/50up satellite connection.
-Also this makes us go backwards into having to store and maintain physical hardware.

I'm quoting the client 15-25 hours of my time to facilitate this so I will be compensated quite well.

I think ideally, it's Egnyte + Buy their employees Laptops so they can work natively at home.

Any thoughts?

 

[brandonkick]

Synology SHOULD work fine. I had a nightmare of a situation with a client I had where the Synology NAS worked fine for years and then all of a sudden some really weird **** started happening. Files would "roll back". Synology support could not help me hone in on the issue. I never could identify it.

In a strange turn of events, I had a DS-415 (the atom CPU bug where the system could just up and refuse to power back up on reboot) die on them and then went full on chicken little regarding the synology and insisted upon abandoning the entire ecosystem. So I migrated the entire company to O365 biz premium, and the DWG files are now living happily in the drafting departments sharepoint library.

Synology did for a while (and should) work just fine. It locked files out like it should. It was a very solid solution until some years in when that started happening.

O365 was a bit of a pain until I got the structure and permissions massaged appropriately, but works fine enough now. It seems the main issue is that the sync client (onedrive) likes to be buggy and throw **** fits here and there.


The universally pointed software solution was Autodesk vault. I can't imagine they sell many subscriptions at $10,000 per year. If it were actually reasonable, I'd have pushed hard on it.

 

[brandonkick]

Interesting tid bit (I think) anyways....

The sharepoint migration tool that you install on your computer, and then use it to sync data... worked slow as beans.


Installing the plug in for Synology NAS for O365 backup, and then configuring which NAS share goes to which sharepoint library.... mannnn oh mannn did that work 1000X better. WAY faster, and much more stable.

I don't know that it'd help for this, but it's a killer way to shove data up into O365.

 

[HCHTech]

AutoDesk is a resource hog and moves a ton of files around the network especially when you have multiple people in the same model. If you decide on a Synology solution, I'd put SSDs in it (maybe NVMe cache drives as well, AND a 10GbE NIC if you've got a 10GbE connection to your switch. Then, as long as you are part way down that rabbit hole, beef up the RAM as well. Money well-spent when you're looking for speed.

 

[Sky-Knight]

You have two choices when it comes to AutoCAD storage...

Local storage, or AutoCAD's PDM.

Any attempt to use cloud based anything will come with catches that do not work in all environments.

You CAN use SharePoint, BUT each user of the CAD team must tell OneDrive to "keep all files local", and you still still run into occasional file corruption issues. The Synology is a solid idea, I suggest implementing HyperBackup to backup the Synology to an S3 bucket or another Synology.

BEWARE, HyperBackup makes data that only it can read. The recovery process is to get a new Synology, install HyperBackup, connect it to the bucket, and download ALL THE DATA before actual recovery can proceed. Watch your RTO!

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Microsoft and Autodesk worked on a solution that uses Teams (Sharepoint...OneDrive sync)....

Autodesk AutoCAD and Microsoft OneDrive and SharePoint

New integrations with Autodesk—an innovator in the CAD industry—allow you to connect AutoCAD and its drafting tools to DWG files stored in Microsoft OneDrive and SharePoint.

www.microsoft.com

I have clients that use it...works fine. Yes train the engineers to know how to keep current project folders on the local disk for sync, and free those folders up when done. Really don't have problems with it...not even corruption.

The "vault" is an excellent solution too, actually it is THE BEST solution. Solidworks also has it...another client I'm working with this week uses that. Expensive, but very much worth it. When your business lives and breathes out of this particular program...why skimp?

 

[Sky-Knight]

@YeOldeStonecat It really depends on scale. If the engineer is working on single files, it does great! But as soon as they start referencing additional files as assemblies things get... difficult. The only fix is Vault and usually that's when people start griping about budget.

Though I will admit in hindsight that seems rather niche, Solidworks is usually taking over at that point, or something similar. SolidWorks PDM is a nightmare honestly, I despise it... but it does work well.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

The client I'm working with this week, I'm moving his 365 tenant from commercial to GCC High...he runs Solidworks. But he travels in and out of office a lot, going from over here...across the globe to Guam ...very frequently. He has always vaulted it with Solidworks.

Re: AutoCAD, one of my other clients uses it quite heavily...however, IMO the key to Teams (Sharepoint/OD sync) working well for them is....beefy computers (which you should have professional graphics workstations for design users anways). For desktops, some of the Lenovo P620 with the AMD ThreadRipper CPU (16 or > true cores). At least 64 gigs of RAM. Lightening fast NVMe drives.

My GCC client I'm migrating, he has one of those rigs, and I just used it to migrate his 4x big Teams doc libraries via OneDrive..over 160 gigs...the thing just kept pumping up the files like a champ! I pulled them all down from the old tenant(Keep on this device), copied to a neutral location (like C:\Download, unjoined old AzureAD tenant..waited for domain to shift to new GCC tenant...joined that tenant...created the Teams...and did the file upload via copy 'n paste. OneDrive never faltered, never gasped for breath...just pumped like a marathon runner til it was done.

For laptops they have mixtures of i7/i9/Xeons..the big Lenovo P17 class, 32 or 64 gigs of RAM.

From this client I saw one of their lower grade laptops not do too well with OD sync and CAD. Some old 8 gig tiring 2.5" old SATA SSD early i5 rig. OD ran sluggish there.

There's also mapping drive to Azure files...as an option, haven't done that yet for a CAD user but thought about it.

 

[Sky-Knight]

Drive mapping to Azure Files is... spotty though thanks to protocol limitations so I try to avoid it. HOWEVER, once Entra ID Private Access goes GA, doing it over that would be stable... sadly the product isn't ready yet.