CAD and CAE applications – like Autodesk’s AutoCAD, Land Desktop, and Inventor; PTC’s Pro/E; Dassault Systems’ CATIA or SolidWorks; and Bentley’s Microstation – generate enormous files that are extremely difficult to work with over WANs.

The most common solution is to maintain a file vault in each site, along with some kind of revision control process or application.

By deploying Steelhead appliances, designers and engineers can collaborate across long distances as if they were in the same offices, sharing enormous CAD files with ease.

Whether users exchange CAD files via FTP, email, or through a remote-file shares, Steelhead appliances can radically improve the speed with which those files move over a WAN. For large files sent over low-bandwidth/high latency links, the gains in performance can easily approach five to 50 times and in some cases up to 100 times.