( 4 reviews )
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Posted: Sep 23 2008
The product works as advertised - I seamlessly operate USB peripherals connected to my network. From the user's perspective - everything is the same. I have noticed the speed tends to be slow - I would not recommended this for USB storage devices. Configuring a USB camera with a GUI on my desktop works exactly as if it were plugged into my computer. For downloading programs to a circuit board using a USB jtag device - the performance is maybe 3 times slower than if it is directly plugged into my computer. This is why I do not recommend this device for remote storage devices such as an external hard drive. I highly recommend it for anything else. I will be using this device to remotely control a camera over a wireless network.
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( 1 of 1 found this review helpful ) Posted: Feb 1 2008
This is a bit lengthy, but a real world application of this tool, allowing me to give it 5 stars without batting an eye. In this modern IT age it's surprising that software vendors of major applications still force us to use the USB "dongle" in our network for license management. We have multiple applications in our environment that rely on a dongle being connected to the distributing license server for users to be able to access a particular application. Recently we migrated our server infrastructure from physical servers to virtual - and our virtualization product of choice was VMWare's ESX server. During testing it became apparant that access to USB devices on the servers motherboard would not be capable even in VMWare's latest 3.5 release (with no expectation for any future support). The first alternative was to run non-virtualized machines for these annoying dongles. Now we would be extremely limited in our disaster recovery and backup of these devices. They are off our SAN and in the case of disaster we would be screwed (our RTO basically out the window). There was also the issue of a single point of failure for these license keys (another fantastic reason why developers still relying on the dongle for commercial or enterprise software licensing are idiots, wake up people). Now, imagine a product that I could rack up in an off site data center (connected via MPLS or some other IPSec VPN), and mount on a virtualized machine as if it were local to that machine. Now, my license dongles are not even in our building, they are in our off-site disaster recovery location (secure in a Tier IV data center). Users can access them through our local virtualized server, which is of course backed up continually. Should our primary data center go down I don't have to worry about the keys. They are IP based so our network never changed. The new VM that boots will connect to the same USB switch and provide the keys to our users. Our RTO would not be affected at all... I could not have deployed this type of solution if it were not for this product. The amount of money invested in virtualization, disaster recovery, and rack leasing off site would have been largely wasted due to the lack of ability to provide licensing of certain business critical applications...! For the cost depending on your scenerio this is a "no duh" product. Therefore, 5 stars.
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( 1 of 1 found this review helpful ) Posted: Jan 14 2008
The Anywhere USB works as advertised. I'm running two USB printers from a Win2003R2 server in another location. Worked well for me because one of the printers only works as a local printer. Couldn't even get it to work with an HP printer USB printer server. The only set up problems I had were fixed by unplugging the power from the Anywhere USB and plugging it back in.
