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We are using Windchill 9.1 M010. Property wt.fv.forceContentToVault is set to true so all contents are going to single vault. Right now size of defaultcachevault is 800 GB (9 million files). With increasing user base in PLM and amount of data uploaded in PLM, it looks like we’ll need 40 GB / month. IT is concerned about the disk space required in future (500 GB /year). We run “Remove Unreferenced Files” on monthly basis, but it doesn’t make any difference.
I am not sure if there are any other companies they have the same kind of disk space issue?
Is there any technology like data compression technique that we can integrate with PLM?
You can't configure Windchill to compress your CAD Files, but you could configure Compression on the filesystem if it is NTFS - I would not recommend this, though as it is likely to slow down your Windchill System.
You can configure Vaulting rules to allow you to put your least used data on a different disk location - perhaps via a mapped network drive, but again this is not something that I would particularly recommend.
You can spend some more money with PTC and buy PTC Archive software which allows you to move old data from your Windchill System (the file data not the meta-data in the db relating to the CAD files) which will reduce the size of your vault - but be very careful about supported OS's and versions of Windchill as we had to wait until Windchill 10.x before we could actually install it in a PTC supported manner.
Really I think that 40GB/mnth is not a huge growth rate - our vault grows at about 200GB/mnth and that this is just the cost of doing business with Windchill and Enterprise software. Your IT dept should allow for this growth rate until you hit a certain size (6-10TB?) where you will need Windchill Archive to reduce your vault size going forwards.
Rgds
Gary
Agree w/Gary on all points.
It's very helpful to have a simple Excel chart that shows the growth over time - facilitates realistic planning for disk space - and encourages you to tackle both remove unreferenced files and purging (with or without archive).
Thanks Gary, Mike for inputs...
While reasearching more I found some material on NetApp Storage Solutions for Windchill. It looks intereseting that NetApp deduplication technology is another core Data ONTAP feature that helps dramatically improve storage use by eliminating duplicate copies of files on primary or secondary storage systems without hindering any user’s access to the file. Because Windchill file vaults store the design files, which may share some commonality, and because deduplication is done at the block level, this can dramatically reduce the data footprint of the PTC file vault repository.
I think instead of buying Windchill archive, I can invest it in NetApp Storage System. Any thoughts on this?
Is there any customer using NetApp Storage system?
Sagar
I presume you have not got a price for the NetApp solution yet then 😉
Also, dedupe is just another form of compression that will slow down your vault access.