Posted by Jordan Pusey
In distributed enterprise environments that rely on a central print server, you’ll find that there are two fundamental disadvantages. The first has to do with the single point of failure that a centralized infrastructure creates: If the server goes down for any reason, printing stops for the entire organization. Even with expensive, high-maintenance redundancy measures in place, that single point of failure poses a threat to basic productivity. The second disadvantage has to do with increased load on the WAN connection and leaves almost all organizations asking how they can minimize or reduce their WAN print traffic.
When remote locations are connected to a central server via a WAN link, everything rests on that lone connection. And that means it becomes a conduit for more than email or Internet traffic—it’s got to handle print-related data as well. The trouble is that print-related data isn’t known for its efficiency. Print jobs that measure only a few hundred kilobytes in size when they leave the client machine can balloon to tens or even hundreds of megabytes once they’re rendered at the central server. In WAN printing scenarios, those much larger jobs then have to travel back to the local printer.
Now calculate the size of all those individual jobs on an enterprise scale. Suddenly you’re talking about gigabytes of printing data moving back and forth across the WAN. All of that places extra and, as it happens, unnecessary load on the vital WAN connection. It’s no wonder that many organizations are looking for ways to minimize print-related WAN traffic, which would not only safeguard and speed up printing but also any other WAN-reliant online activity.
Traditionally, the default solution to minimize print-related WAN traffic has been to install additional print servers at remote locations. Although this might address some of the more glaring WAN printing issues, it’s an expensive and non-optimal solution because it costs money to procure, maintain, operate and ultimately upgrade print servers. Consolidated print environments usually have centralized management paradigms in place, too, and print servers are not always easy to manage remotely—particularly when they crash.
PrinterLogic’s next-generation print management solution rethinks WAN printing completely. It delivers all the benefits of a consolidated print infrastructure while allowing your organization to minimize print-related WAN traffic from the get-go. Furthermore, it eliminates the single points of failure associated with print servers, because PrinterLogic allows your users to continue printing as usual during a WAN failure or even in the rare event of a server outage. Here are just a few of its advantages:
Centralized management: No matter how widely distributed your organization, PrinterLogic enables you to oversee and administer every printer across the enterprise from a single pane of glass. And it does so without the usual drawbacks of print servers and WAN printing.
Minimal infrastructure: Unlike conventional print management solutions, PrinterLogic doesn’t require you to install a unique server in every single location where you want to implement reliable printing. Because PrinterLogic leverages proven direct IP technology to create direct connections between client devices and printers, local printing remains robust and traffic from WAN printing is reduced considerably.
Scalability and flexibility: PrinterLogic’s print management solution doesn’t just minimize print-related WAN traffic. It effortlessly grows and adapts to your organization’s size and structure. What’s more, through modules like Pull Printing and Mobile Printing, you can easily introduce enhanced functionality across your entire print environment.
If you’re looking to minimize print-related WAN traffic and fix the inherent vulnerabilities of WAN printing, PrinterLogic can put those goals—plus many more—within reach from the moment of deployment.