Vault Archiving

[slandry]

My organization is currently in the process of deploying a Windchill 11 environment. Are there any preferred and supported solutions for archiving vault data as we are expecting a large data store of around 50 + TB

Any suggestions would be greatly apprecated

[MikeLockwood]

May want to invest in Windchill Archive (I think it's still called that).  Moves all from the "active" database to a "standby" database and allows moving the vaulted files to a less busy device.

At Alcon we bought it and I played with it quite a bit but we never put it in production.

Other than that, tune the database for a large number of objects - generally need (assuming Oracle) a dedicated tablespace for each big table, with multiple data files.

[GaryMansell]

I would recommend steering well clear of Windchill Archive (if PTC even still dare to sell it?) - it is about as much use as a chocolate teapot. We purchased it, found it not fit for purpose and had to press PTC for a refund.

Presuming they have not fixed it since a couple of years ago, the problem was that the resulting archive files could not each be larger than 2GB in size ! That, and the fact that it was impossible to guess how much data you could select to put in the archive file - if you chose too many items and it came to more than 2GB in archive file size it would fail and you would then need to try another selection with less files ! It was Impossible to use - we were adding more data to the system daily than we could archive in a day so it is not a usable solution.

Maybe the product has been improved, but I somehow doubt it - maybe someone from PTC can advise?

We decided that we would have to lose all the iterations and purge instead without archiving them. Even so, our vault is 8TB and growing...

[bsindelar]

Hello Stephen.

I realize this is a bit of an old entry, but have you stood up your WC 11 instance?

Obviously you can use external file vaulting in Windchill to store your files, and they can be stored in a SAN accessible to the Windchill application server if desired (as opposed to the app server itself, which isn't really an option because of the large space needed).

Regarding actually ARCHIVING that data, I guess it would depend on your needs for data recovery.  If you would need to recover quickly and size is not an issue, then simply duplicating that whole vault and all it's content to a separate physical location (another SAN?) would be one way to go.  Then, you could restore files as needed.  You can also use a robocopy-like process, run nightly, to update the archive location with anything created in the Windchill vault that day, thus keeping everything in sync.

If your PRESENT day data need is 50TB, I'd recommend you try to estimate what you'd need for the next 5 years in terms of growth (maybe average 5TB year for argument's sake?) ... which would be 75TB in 5 years ... so you'd need at least that for the "vault SAN", and then another one of that size for the "archive SAN".

Again, the archiving assumes you need a full vault copy on hand.  You can always drastically reduce the size requirement of that SAN if you only needed the past month/quarter/year of data available, and again use a robocopy-like process accordingly.

My company supports all things Windchill - feel free to check out our website (www.eccellent.com) or e-mail me directly if you have any other ideas you'd like to bounce off us for other questions/opinions you may have.