Posted by Jordan Pusey
Every single print job—every letter, every report, every presentation—contributes in some way to your network print traffic. And in distributed organizations with a consolidated server environment, network printing generates a significant amount of WAN print traffic. This is because the print jobs actually wind up traveling from the local endpoint devices to the offsite central server via the WAN, then back again to the local network printer. That excess data flow has the potential to impact general network performance for the entire remote site, resulting in slower (or temporarily stopped) printing as well as slower web browsing, email, VoIP and anything else that requires Internet access.
Surprisingly, those network printing jobs are larger than you think. Even relatively tiny, kilobyte-sized files can balloon into multi-megabyte-sized jobs when they’re converted into formats that can be translated by your organization’s network printers into the proper output. The larger those files, the more network print traffic they create, the more congested your bandwidth becomes, and the more sluggish your network performance will be. That’s a surefire way to hinder productivity and irritate your end users.
The ideal solution is therefore not just to reduce network print traffic but to eliminate it altogether. But how?
PrinterLogic is an enterprise network printing solution that was designed with efficiency in mind right from the very start—and one of its many important efficiency improvements has to do with network print traffic. By managing direct IP technology to establish one-to-one connections between endpoint devices and destination printers, PrinterLogic can eliminate the WAN print traffic that comes from routine print jobs. Instead of print jobs crossing the WAN repeatedly and growing exponentially as they do so, they take the optimal route from point A to point B.
As you know, however, network printing is about more than just print jobs. It involves management as well, which can generate WAN print traffic of its own. For example, when driver installations or updates are pushed out to workstations across the enterprise, they generally do so for each instance. In other words, a file measuring anywhere between 40 and 150MB in size ends up being sent across the wide-area network as many times as there are workstations.
To avoid this, PrinterLogic has the ability to integrate quickly and easily with your existing WAN caching technologies so that drivers only need to be sent to each remote location once. The workstations can then update or install using this locally stored driver. In large organizations where printer drivers are potentially being installed hundreds of times per day, this elimination of cross-WAN driver download can boost network speed considerably.
Some network printing solutions claim to simply reduce network print traffic. Yet, by virtue of its robust direct IP backbone and seamless integration with other WAN caching solutions, PrinterLogic can come close to eliminating WAN network print entirely. That helps to optimize bandwidth usage and makes network printing fast, efficient and fluid across the entire enterprise.