Altium introduces a major innovation in data management for electronics design: the Altium Satellite Vault

The server-based software application, which can be local-, LAN-, WAN- or cloud-hosted, is used to create secure, fully managed design data repositories (Satellite Vaults) that enable collaborative management of electronic design data across the design, procurement and manufacturing spaces.

Altium's Satellite Vaults complement Altium Designer 10, Altium's unified electronic product development system, by allowing all designers and companies to manage and share their design and release data easily.

The vaults can be accessed directly from within Altium Designer 10 or via a standard browser interface by others in the company, such as manufacturing and procurement managers or any authorized user.

Working together with Altium's cloud-based ecosystem, AltiumLive , Altium Designer and Altium Vault technology provide an advanced, innovative solution to sharing and maintaining high integrity electronic product design data.

Smart data management
Altium Vaults form the heart of Altium’s smart data management technologies by providing storage, formal revision management and lifecycle state management.

Design content is automatically validated when released to a vault from Altium Designer, where the generated content is stored as named revisions that have a definable lifecycle status.

The vault items typically represent reusable design content, components and released designs for fabrication of bare-boards and electronic assemblies.

Along with managed sharing of validated design content and the potential for business systems integration, Altium Vault technology allows designers to reuse design data with full confidence in its provenance, lifecycle state (suitable for prototype, production, etc) and where it has been used in existing designs.

Vaults also provide intelligent links to the supply chain, providing real-time information about the parts being specified in a design.

Vault servers
The Altium Satellite vault is one of three vault systems under development by Altium. To cater for a range of deployment scenarios and company needs, the Satellite Vault will soon be joined by Altium's Managed and Enterprise Vault server options.

The Altium Enterprise Vault server (EVS) will offer a fully independent Vault service for those companies where internet access outside the enterprise LAN/WAN is impractical or not possible. In this case, user verification is handled by an associated authentication server, whereas for Satellite Vaults, the validation of user credentials is via the AltiumLive ecosystem.

The proposed Managed Vault system provides cloud-based vaults that are hosted and managed entirely within AltiumLive as an on-demand service.