Applications Collide with WAFS and De-Dupe

There has been a lot of attention, good and bad, surrounding the collision of Autodesk applications and Wide Area File Services (WAFS) solutions. (Note:  I use the term WAFS because that is what most people are familiar with, a better term to talk about the functionality is Wide Area Data Services or WAN Optimization).  Two Autodesk applications, AutoCAD and AutoCAD Civil 3D, create problems for any technology that relies on de-duplication capabilities.  Customers configure the 'save' features on certain application files and the applications scramble all the bytes of the file regardless of whether any changes were made.  (OK, I am done with technical stuff).  The problem is that when customers attempt to share or store these files, they cannot be de-duplicated because of all the byte scrambling which means that there is no way for WAFS solutions or storage de-duplication solutions to impact (or improve) performance and capacity. 

To date, most of the discussion has been around WAFS because many Autodesk customers are architects and engineers that share files across remote offices and need the performance boost.  It appears that all the WAFS vendors (Riverbed, Silver Peak, Cisco, etc) are impacted and are working with Autodesk to resolve the issue.  While this situation may not impact your life, there are some 'read between the lines' impacts that everyone should be aware of and that will be this week's list.

• There is an application out there besides Oracle, Exchange, SharePoint and Web 2.0 YouTube stuff (I really don't know what this is, but  everyone talks about it so it must be real).
• Autodesk application developers probably did the 'save and scramble the bytes' development for a reason.  They probably had no idea what the downstream impact to WAFS and storage systems that have de-duplication features would be.  (De-duplication solutions look for bytes that have not changed or aren't already stored and the Autodesk files would constantly trick them like they trick WAFS.)  It proves that no matter how functional the acceleration and de-duplication products are, there needs to be application knowledge.
• There will likely be more applications that collide with what WAFS and de-duplication vendors are trying to do.  I think this is a very good thing because the application developers will soon understand that what they do will impact the underlying infrastructure.
• Prior versions of Autodesk applications did not create this issue. It only happened after upgrades to a more recent version.  Customers should ask questions about how files are saved, transported and ultimately stored when they are thinking about application upgrades.  This line of questioning can help preserve investments in WAFS and de-duplication products. 
• It is clear that WAFS solutions like those from Riverbed and Silver Peak are adding significant value for Autodesk customers. (If they weren't adding value, losing the benefit wouldn't be headline news and I would be blogging about college basketball right now).  I am sure that these solutions can do the same for other applications and ESG has seen some of them in action via our Lab group.  If you want to make the most use of your existing bandwidth, whether it is for application file sharing or for remote replication, WAFS makes a ton of sense (translated - you want to do these things but don't want to buy more network capacity.  Therefore the only way to do them is by buying something that makes the network bandwidth you have more efficient).