File Sharing and Collaboration Solutions are Redesigning Architectural and Engineering Firms

on June 23, 2014

Talon Storage says high-performance file sharing and collaboration solutions save time and resources for firms

Mount Laurel, NJ – June 23, 2014 – Architectural and engineering companies have a headache with file sharing and collaboration as employees often work on large files that, when shared across networks, lose quality and degrade. This is according to Andrew Mullen, Senior VP Sales and Marketing of Talon Storage, who believes that many solutions are designed to create efficient file sharing and collaboration, but do not offer a high quality user experience.

“It’s common for up to 100 architects to collaborate in real-time on a detailed project that includes very large sets of drawings and plans. Data could be sitting thousands of miles away but the team needs to be able to access files as if they were sitting on the local area network (LAN). More often than not, firms find the wide area network (WAN) has limited bandwidth and very high latency. This causes big delays and performance bottlenecks, which jeopardizes productivity,” stated Mullen.

“More often than not we see a growing number of architectural and engineering firms struggle with their current file sharing solutions as they don’t deliver a 100 percent user experience. Firms need full-scale branch office consolidation, and performance bottlenecks eliminated, to be able to achieve optimal performance. Many solutions on the market do not have the capabilities to do this.”

Mullen continues: “For optimal file sharing performance, solutions should be an integral part of the Microsoft Windows Server based framework. File Aware™ Optimization is key to increasing productivity as it accelerates user response time. By acting as an out-of-band file distributed mechanism between the client and the server, and having a detailed understanding of how the SMB/CIFS protocol functions, file-sharing advances can now anticipate user requests. This results in data being retrieved before clients request it – due to the traditionally ‘chatty’ nature of CIFS, the performance improvement is dramatically increased.”

Commonly used applications, such as AutoDesk, Revit, Microstation, Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign, are large-scale design files where the data is not easily compressible. This makes it challenging for firms to leverage WAN optimization and replication as it often falls short on performance and end-user productivity.

End-to-end distributed locking guarantees file integrity between users to fully benefit from Microsoft and application locking principles. This helps ensure productivity and eliminate loss of data or duplicate files.

Mullen concludes: “Having multiple offices across the globe, and working on one project with one set of plans, is now very much a reality for many firms. Technology is catching up with demand, and architectural and engineering firms need to look closely at whether their current infrastructure is up to the job.”

About Talon
Talon, a leader in next generation software-defined storage solutions, enables enterprises to centralize and consolidate IT storage infrastructure, while bringing data closer to their users, enabling enterprise global file sharing and collaboration. This results in streamlined IT management and improved end user productivity. From its headquarters in Mount Laurel, NJ and its global locations, Talon serves the largest Global 2000 organizations including the most established Architectural, Construction, Engineering, Energy, Offshore and Manufacturing companies.

Talon FAST™ is a trademark of Talon Storage Solutions, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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