Face it, even cloud is trending and growing fast, on enterprise premise systems are representing a major part of engineering and manufacturing systems in organizations. It includes ERP, CRM, PDM, PLM systems as well as zillions of Excels and CAD files. I’ve been thinking how to optimize cloud/on-premise data co-existance. My attention was caught by the news about Amazon Storage Gateway. Amazon, in its push to draw more enterprise customers, had to make sure the Amazon Storage Gateway will run in Microsoft Hyper-v virtualized shops. Which expands the ability of Amazon to synchronize data between cloud and on premise environment.
For those of you not familiar with ASG (Amazon Storage Gateway), navigate to the following link to learn more. The AWS Storage Gateway supports two configurations:
1/ Gateway-Cached Volumes: You can store your primary data in Amazon S3, and retain your frequently accessed data locally. Gateway-Cached volumes provide substantial cost savings on primary storage, minimize the need to scale your storage on-premises, and retain low-latency access to your frequently accessed data.
2/ Gateway-Stored Volumes: In the event you need low-latency access to your entire data set, you can configure your on-premises gateway to store your primary data locally, and asynchronously back up point-in-time snapshots of this data to Amazon S3. Gateway-Stored volumes provide durable and inexpensive off-site backups that you can recover locally or from Amazon EC2 if, for example, you need replacement capacity for disaster recovery.
The two options are representing an interesting option on how enterprise data can co-exist between cloud and on-premise environments. I can see mid-size companies are doing it to optimize their file storages. Larger companies can use it for extended value chain communication.
What is my conclusion? As cloud systems will expand in organizations, the demand for hybrid environment will grow as well. Companies won’t be able to migrate enterprise data assets outside of organizations fast, therefore cloud PLM solutions that will be able to communicate and co-exist in hybrid deployments will grow. The ability to connect existing enterprise data assets and cloud apps is a key to make future cloud expansion. Just my thoughts…
Best, Oleg
Posted by olegshilovitsky
I want to touch a topic called "metadata" today. You probably heard "metadata" term many times. However, if your roots are with CAD and PDM, most of the time you touched "metada" it was related to managing of metadata as "data about CAD models". I want to take wider definition of metadata. Wikipedia provides the following definition to
I would like to speak about PDM today. You can hardly find engineers that like data management. For many years, Product Data Management (PDM) kept the score of inevitable evil in engineering and manufacturing software. Everybody wants data, but nobody want to manage it. At the same time, even if PDM is quite challenging in terms of implementation, it brings a lot of benefits. Navigate to the following 

Nobody is not surprised how important information nowadays. Actually, maybe it is not true. What we usually do was called "data management" – CAD,Engineering Document / Data Management, Product Data Management, Product Lifecycle Management. Data played an important role in this process of "management". However, the biggest confusion was created by the CAD/PLM industry was about losing the point of information importance.
I screw up my promise to stop blogging during my vacation. I’m in Israel these days with my family. You are probably asking what this picture of Pink Lady apple does on my blog. I made yesterday evening in the hotel in Tel-Aviv where I’m staying. Of course, I appreciate the hotel for complimentary welcome service. At the same time, what struck me is that this apple was absolutely identical to the apple from local Costco store in Brookline, Mass I ate just before leaving home. Amazing example of global supply channels. What potentially can make apple made in USA travels all the way down to Middle East. I found hard to find the answer on this question. Is there a chance future PLM data services will be able to answer these questions? If you have an idea of explanation, speak your mind. Now, let me turn it back to a traditional top 5 post.
I want to talk about Part Numbers. Yes, Part Numbers, again… My previous blog -






