Panzura's cloudy gear hits others' WAN optimisation kit for six

Cloudy firm Panzura's cloud storage gateway is saving distributed projects businesses enormous amounts of time when opening shared project files, it claims. So much so that Panzura is now focusing on the Architectural, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) market niche. Panzura FS is a global single namespace file system with …

[sjiveson]

Huh?

Whilst I agree with some of the figures you quote, the ones from the company itself seem somewhat spurious. How were those figures come to? What was the latency to the actual file source etc. etc. I'm no storage expert but I'd imagine they are removing serialised opens, locks, closes etc. and making everything parallel?

[Wombling_Free]

The issue in the AEC world is that unlike big database, Desktop CAD/BIM applications are relying on PC-level hardware to do what normally takes server arrays. CAD/BIM software is really, really nasty with disk access - with thousands of little read-write-open-lock-close commands on every element within the main BIM database. The example given - 1.5MB is TINY - a 'standard' highrise residential tower can run to 2-3GB file size. The open-lock-close file access requests can number in the millions for a file this size.

Do a test. Download the trial version of Revit from Autodesk, start up Sysinternals ProcMon and run a trace of the file open command on the basic sample file. You will be astonished at the amount of file access faffing around the software does. But hey ho, everyones been busy developing spreadsheets and Flappy Bird clones and not paying much attention to a massive field that is only responsible for, like, cities.

[dan1980]

@Wombling_Free

Yes, the problem here is with applications that are coded in ways that are unfriendly to such situations. We see similar problems with Adobe CS files - InDesign (which is also, basically a big database) can be a big problem, specifically.

That's, presumably, why they are going to focus on the space they are - other, better behaved applications may not benefit quite as much.

[jonathankstorey]

What about netscaler or other devices?

I'm a bit a of citrix head & pretty sure citrix has very similar technology for chatty applications / files to enable link optimization of the client server communications - do they have any comparisons with other products?

Jonathan.