Does Serverless Printing Work for Companies with Large Numbers of Print Servers Already Deployed?

When we talk about PrinterLogic and the advantages of serverless printing, most organizations are eager to hear more. Centralized printer management? Reduced print-related WAN traffic? Self-service printer installation? Seamless VDI printing? Yes, please!

In organizations that already have large numbers of print servers deployed, sometimes that excitement is accompanied by skepticism. Can a single instance of PrinterLogic really replace dozens of print servers? And are the benefits of serverless printing the same for eliminating five print servers as for eliminating fifty? (Hint: Yes.)

Whereas legacy print-management solutions—for example, print servers and conventional direct IP—see diminishing returns in large organizations, PrinterLogic is different. Its benefits scale to match the size and complexity of your enterprise.

Migrating from multiple print servers to a serverless printing infrastructure like PrinterLogic’s helps to achieve unprecedented simplicity. With print servers deployed, you wind up with lots of fragmentation in your print environment. Each print server creates a kind of micro-environment that needs to be managed independently.

It’s the exact opposite with PrinterLogic. Our solution’s centralized printer management lets you administer your entire print environment from a single pane of glass. That web-based console consolidates the print environment into one unified whole.

Clearly, organizations that have a bunch of print micro-environments also have the most to gain. And that also applies to organizations with tons of complex deployment schemes too. Because PrinterLogic eliminates the need for GPOs and scripts, you can configure advanced deployments without the shortcomings of Group Policy and custom scripting.

So, along with reducing massive amounts of physical infrastructure, PrinterLogic streamlines print management. The more reduction and streamlining you have to do, the more impact PrinterLogic will have. On that note, let’s look at some potential cost savings.

Each print server at each site requires hardware procurement and licensing, cooling, power, physical security, management, maintenance, upgrades, virus scans and so on. All of those “hidden” costs add up. Most estimates peg the average total cost of a print server at $2,000 to $5,000 per year.

In other words, you’re saving that amount with each print server you eliminate. And by replacing them with a single print management solution like PrinterLogic, you can get a better fix on your overall print budget.

That’s not the only thing. Using PrinterLogic’s advanced print reporting, you can audit your print environment down to the user level. This makes it easy to keep tabs on individual printers and see which ones are in high demand or can be retired.

You can even track printing usage throughout entire organization and see where color printing is higher than it needs to be. AAA Carolinas used that very feature to reclaim what they described as “a pretty good stack of dollars” (read the case study here).

Based on their experience with ordinary print management solutions, many IT experts assume that abandoning print servers poses a major hurdle. But migrating to a serverless printing environment is easier than you might think. With PrinterLogic, it’s just three steps:

1. Open the PrinterLogic Admin Console

2. Import your existing printers

3. Deploy the PrinterLogic client using your preferred method

Once PrinterLogic is implemented, you can manage printers and drivers across your organization—regardless of whether you use domains or not. Any changes you make to a printer object are automatically applied to that printer on all your workstations. No wonder why so many customers tell us that PrinterLogic’s centralized printer management is transformative.

Or, in the words of Bank Plus, “invaluable.” Here’s a community bank that had 65 different locations across Mississippi and a print server at every one of them. Adding new print servers was meant to ease the burden but only ended up making things worse. PrinterLogic’s serverless printing infrastructure changed all that, saving them time, headache and money. Read the case study here. Serverless printing can do the same for you. Sign up for a trial today and test PrinterLogic free of charge for 30 days. Cloud or on-prem, the choice is yours. You’ll soon see why the question isn’t about whether large organizations can eliminate print servers. It’s about how they could have waited so long to do it.