ProjectWise - Data Storage Limits

Are you asking about storage in Bentley's hosted environment?

Yes within ProjectWise. Are there any storage limits to the cloud based software? 

You can run projectwise on your own servers or use Bentley's hosted solution.

ProjectWise's limits are the limits of the underlying OS, for on premise if you have 5TB of drive space available, you can use it. For hosted the underlying system is Azure and 5TB is also no problem.

for single file file size 100GB is no problem but you start running into issues of network speed. Projectwise can host a 100GB file but if your network connection is slow and it takes all day to download it may not work for you.

since you mention point clouds, if you store your point clouds in the correct format you might be able to take advantage of point cloud streaming.

docs.bentley.com/.../GUID-B9554607-7E00-A493-FDF8-81E2D87A69EB.html

Isn't that 5TB per datasource? How many datasources can you have? Seems unlimited though performance may suffer without a load balanced server farm. Some companies that host their own have multiple servers without load balancing which presumably is done when they have data centers in multiple locations and want the speed of a LAN

No. I'm going to mostly talk about on-premise because that's what we've got. Bentley hosted uses Azure databases and storage so they have different methods of architecting their solutions because the abilities and limitations of Azure are different than on-premise.

There is effectively no file size limit or total number of files that can be placed in ProjectWise. The limitations of ProjectWise are much more about network bandwitdth and database throughput than file size or file count.

The limitation is how much pain your users are willing to put up with to download files needed to work and how much money you're willing to spend to provide appropriate resources. ProjectWise has a host of tools to mitigate this, but if you put a 100GB file in Projectwise and your users are willing to tolerate the time transfer takes, then you can put as many as you want, up to Windows limits (which are HUUUGE).

ProjectWise is very modular. If you architect your system properly you can separate file transfer from database queries and then huge file transfers have zero impact on database load and won't affect other users.

Each datasource database is separate from every other datasource database. Files are in storage areas that can be spread across multiple servers & locations, and you can have local caching to help with keeping copies of data from remote locations locally.

Because datasource databases are independent rather than clustering our database server we just split them on to multiple database servers. We have 13 active datasources on 6 database servers.

We do load balance our integration servers, we have 4 (for users, each indexing and file property extraction server has it's own independent one). We have 20 storage areas and 70 caching only servers.

I believe our single largest file is about 50 GB, it's a zip file with a milestone archive of the project someone dropped back into the project. that datasource has about 2.7 million documents and a total data store of 7TB. This particular datasource stores all files on a single separate cache server. None of our storage areas are on integration servers and we don't use UNCs to access storage areas because the load goes through the integration server when you do that. We didn't want large numbers of file transfers shutting down the network port of our integration servers.

This is nowhere near a large Projectwise installation. But it handles up to about 1000 active users pretty well.

Basically for larger installations don't put your database server or your file storage on your integration server and your limitations become mostly the network connection, and if you do a lot of Civil3D, the CPU on the integration server, and what your users will tolerate. Scaling up becomes adding more database servers or integration servers or file servers (and doing database maintenance like cleaning out audit trails and the chkl table)