SmartShare StraightShaper 310 review

Upgrading business net connections can be expensive, so it can pay dividends to make better use of existing resources. One method is bandwidth management, and Danish company SmartShare Systems offers a range of affordable solutions for SMBs.

The StraightShaper family delivers intelligent bandwidth management that aims to give all users a fair slice of the internet pie. They identify users by their IP address and apply load balancing so each one is serviced in turn. Integral QoS also identifies timing-critical traffic such as VoIP and automatically prioritises it.

SmartShare's download and upload optimisers monitor bandwidth, and in times of plenty allow users to have as much as they want. When bandwidth is tight, the optimisers kick in and make sure each user gets an equal share.

The StraightShaper 310 is licensed for ten IP addresses. All excess users are bundled together as a virtual user and treated as one IP address. The 310 software can be upgraded to a 320 or a 350, which can handle up to 20 or 50 IP addresses respectively.

Deployment is a cinch, since the appliance is completely transparent. We connected it between our LAN and WAN and suffered only a brief interruption to services while we connected cables. The 310 doesn't offer a hardware bypass switch, so if it fails or is powered off then you'll lose your internet connection.

The appliance needs to be where it can see all LAN devices. If you put it in front of a router or gateway performing NAT then all the users on the other side will have the same address and only be considered as one device.

Management is via the dedicated network port or through the LAN port. On first contact with the simple web interface you need to enter the real upload and download speeds of your WAN connection. You'll find a useful online utility for this at www.speedtest.net, which offers measurements of true upload and download speeds.

We fired up big downloads from five LAN systems and watched the pie charts in the top screen showing them all getting an equal share. These Java apps provide a near real-time status display, although general usage line graphs were difficult to interpret.

There's no need to manually prioritise VoIP traffic, but if you want it to get the lion's share then select the extra priority tickbox, which will take as much bandwidth as needed to ensure call quality is maintained. User groups allow the appliance to handle traffic coming from different subnets. These define IP address ranges to be considered as a single user, and applying weightings to each one means you can decide what bandwidth resources they can have.

The StraightShaper 310 offers out-of-the-box WAN bandwidth management at a price that will appeal to small businesses. It lacks a hardware bypass, but scores well for ease of use and its ability to handle VoIP traffic automatically.

Author: Dave Mitchell