TalonFAST Revit Overview - Cloud Distribution

Datasheet | How Talon FAST enables AutoDesk Revit®
How Talon FAST enables high-speed
collaboration and storage consolidation for the
AutoDesk Revit® product suite
About Revit®
Autodesk Revit® is specifically built for Building Information Modeling
(BIM), empowering design and construction professionals to bring
ideas from concept to construction with a coordinated and consistent
model-based approach. Autodesk Revit® is a single application
that includes features for architectural design, MEP and structural
engineering, and construction.
Enabling Collaboration with FAST
Businesses in the Architecture, Construction and Engineering industries
are all facing the same challenge: Enabling high-speed collaboration
for today’s 24/7 workforce while centralizing data in a cloud or
privately owned datacenter infrastructure.
Projects and staff are geographically dispersed, working from branch
offices, at a construction site, from home or even on-the-go. Information
needs to be anywhere and it must be performing at its best. By
leveraging techniques such as data compression, reduction and readahead/write-back
caching Talon FAST truly optimizes the application
performance and increases user productivity.
100% User Experience Delivered. FAST
Understanding Revit® Technology
Autodesk Revit® is considered one of many enterprise File-Aware
applications. These applications are running on a user’s workstation
and the large projects and its associated components are stored on a
shared storage subsystem in a central location.
Extending datacenter storage infrastructure into the branch can be a
real pain. Global enterprises have tried distributing storage and File-
Aware application data to branch offices and remote locations through
WAN Optimization, Storage Replication and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure
(VDI), these solutions proved to be unsuccessful.
Talon FAST combines the best of both WAN optimization and
storage synchronization worlds in order to improve application performance
and enable cross-border collaboration, in low bandwidth
and high-latency environments, while being 100% compatible with
Revit®’s Worksharing and element borrowing features.
Revit® Worksharing
There are various ways to collaborate with applications such as
Autodesk Revit®. The most common scenario is done through
Worksharing and Workset management using a so called “Central”

file. The Revit® project is stored on a file share or network location and
facilitates a subset of files, including the project model, synchronization
logs and permissions databases. These meta-files contain information
about which user is ‘checked in’ a workset or component within the
project.
These collaboration features allow businesses to create a globally
dispersed collaborative BIM environment, but requires high speed
network and storage infrastructure in order to deliver optimal end-user
experience.
The Big Challenge
Companies who have tried Thin Client computing (VDI) for Revit®
collaboration have experienced application-specific performance
bottlenecks. Storage and network infrastructure constraints, such
as limited bandwidth and high latency, are directly impacting the
end-user experience.
FAST and Secure Delivery of BIM
The FAST solution benefits from our patented File-Aware differencing
mechanisms, fully honouring Microsoft CIFS file locking
principles by leasing out the files correlated to the active project to
the users requesting projects, worksets or embedded elements in
those drawings.
Talon FAST is fully built and secured on a Microsoft Windows
Server platform and benefits from storage caching semantics by
hosting the cached projects on an NTFS file system, maintaining all
security principles, such as ACLs, permissions and file attributes, on
a secured file system in the branch office.
AutoDesk products such as Revit® Architecture and Revit® MEP
ulitize enhanced file locking mechanisms, fully supported by Talon
FAST, in order to enable real-time collaboration in a globally dispersed
environment.
Network Infrastructure solutions such as WAN optimization and
Revit® Server have not been able to deliver the desired application
experience because of the amount of bulk file-transactions taking
place.
Simply optimizing TCP traffic for these large File-Aware transactions
will not benefit the end-user’s application performance, it will only
reduce WAN traffic.
Talon FAST helps you in enabling your distributed workforce to
collaborate with large-scale BIM projects in real-time.
Synchronization of a “Central” file immediately benefits from our
FAST File-Aware streaming and data compression/reduction
technology, only sending the file differences to the centralized copy
and incrementally retrieving the latest contents from the backend file
server.
Write-Back Caching functionality allows the user to continue their
work on other worksets within the project or even different projects
while bulk transfers are taking place in the background.
File-Aware Technology
Talon FAST delivers real-time collaboration of projects and
allows model updates to be saved incrementally using our
File-Aware Differencing mechanisms. This speeds up any file
transaction up to 400 times faster, drastically speeding up
application performance.
Seamless Global Collaboration
For each branch office Talon FAST leverages a LAN-like
storage replica, compressing and streaming data back to
the datacenter while users continue to work on the models.
Speeding up File-Aware Applications
• Experience LAN-Like performance in low bandwidth/high latency branch office locations
• Deliver Critical Applications to Business Units by pre-populating and pre-staging data for remote, offshore locations
Enabling the Distributed Workforce
• Introducing Real-time Collaboration while ensuring 24/7 productivity to the end user
Simplifying Branch Office IT infrastructure
• Branch-office-in-a-box Technology, designed on a Windows Server 2008 R2 / 2012 hosted platform
• Available in physical, virtual appliance and as a software package (any 3rd party HW)
• Certified for hosting Active Directory, DNS, DFS, DHCP, Software Distribution and local File and Print services
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