Hello
Our PDM Archives folder is almost 2 TB.
Can the PDM manage a drive containing the " PDM Archives" folder of more than 2 TB?
Can the " Archive " folder be stored on a NAS?
Thank you
Hello.
Our EPDM servers are on virtual machines, it works well (but only 11GB on our main base for now).
I'm not sure if NAS is the best way to store EPDM files.
Personally I would stay on real servers (respecting the prerequisites given by EPDM).
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Hello;
The information below is slightly dated (2021 / 2022) but...
Like @froussel , I'm not convinced by the NAS/EPDM association.
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Thank you!
We are already on a virtual server in a Data Center, but terabytes and additional drives are expensive, so we are looking for an alternative.
For the NAS it seems to me that it is not recommended, but I wanted to be sure of it and possibly a feedback from a user who has encountered the same problem.
I've never done it but there is a way to clean up the servers: search for ' cold storage '.
The idea is to put everything that is not really used on servers other than the main server.
We can either put projects in it or say that we only keep the main revisions and not the intermediate archivings... There are many different possibilities of memory.
It may be possible to use a NAS for this type of ' secondary ' storage.
The problem is that it will take longer to upload data from this storage (but from memory it is still possible)
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Hello
We are already at 2TB, we will soon exceed them but we are indeed planning to clean up.
The size of the archive database is not a problem in itself (it is more in the time to obtain and overall the performance of the server that can generate slowdowns related to the size of the database)
You also need to make your users aware of the need to use version replacement for archiving.
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Hello
What are the reasons why the NAS would not be suitable? I ask naively because I don't know anything about infra and today we run with more than 2TB on... a NAS 
, so I'm worried!
Hello @romain.jouanny
A NAS can almost be a real file server depending on what you buy nowadays.
I'm not saying that it doesn't work but already that everything bugs when you follow SW's recommendations, when you don't follow them... (a bit of bad faith because EPDM seems to be one of the most reliable stuff managed by SW).
Is your EPDM archive not on the archive server? It still adds a layer of mess and it doesn't seem too complicated to add storage on the archive server rather than storing the archive data on a NAS.
Hello
Thank you for your feedback. I inherit an environment installed without me (until now I only managed the application part, without worrying about the server infrastructure) and I am now trying to understand how it works on the infra side and what can be improved.
The current structure as I understand it, with questions:
- a dedicated physical server A for the SQL/BDD server part
- an archive storage space on a partition of a NAS B
- the archive server: ?? I can't understand if we're talking about a physical server, a VM, just the " archive server" application that is launched on server A... In short, I'm floundering .
In any case, what is sure is that yes our archives are stored on a NAS.
On EPDM, the archive server can be the same as the SQL server or not.
At home, we have separated the archive server from the sql server but it is not mandatory.
On the other hand, generally the archive files are stored on the archive server (that's kind of its purpose in life at this server). Having the archives stored elsewhere seems strange to me.
Or you had everything on a single server, the space ran out → they moved the archive files to the famous NAS without changing the architecture of the server. I think that this kind of hacking should not be officially supported.
Indeed, I think that the two servers are on the same machine. How can this be verified?
This config was made by visiativ so I'm surprised that it doesn't meet the official preorders. But maybe our infrastructure prevented us from doing so (I don't have the history).
On the other hand, next year we will change the physical machine that hosts these servers, it could be an opportunity to start again on a cleaner basis by separating the two servers (VM for example?).
With us, our two servers (archive and SQL) are virtual machines.
The fact that Epdm separated the servers is probably due to the fact that the archive server grows much faster in disk space.
There is also the reason of a SQL server and several archive servers installed in different physical sites (that's basically why we didn't put the archive server with the SQL server: we had an archive server in the USA. The fact that we had the 2 separate archive servers made the architecture of the archive servers totally identical on both sides)
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OK, I see the idea better. Thank you for all these explanations!