Print servers are one of the top sources of frustration in business printing. Just look at any online tech forum. Odds are that it’s full of threads started by IT professionals who’ve been driven to distraction by one or more printing issues. Printers are disappearing from workstations. Group policy deployments aren’t working like they should. A rogue process keeps crashing the spooler. Driver management is a nightmare.
The conversation on those threads is revealing. While there are plenty of fellow sufferers who try to help troubleshoot the problems and offer alternative printing solutions, print servers do have some defenders. More often than not, though, they tend to take the “better the devil you know” stance. Print servers have serious shortcomings, they admit. But you can’t seriously think of eliminating them.
I’m here to say that you can eliminate print servers without compromise. With a single solution, no less. You can ditch all that unwanted infrastructure and enjoy superior business printing and print management. That includes things like higher print availability, near infinite scalability and administration that’s virtually effortless.
PrinterLogic’s serverless printing infrastructure makes it possible.
What if you already have consolidated print servers?
Print server consolidation takes all the printing in your organization and channels it through one device.
At first glance, that makes a lot of sense, which is why consolidation is still a popular choice among printing solutions. It simplifies basic print infrastructure. It simplifies print management. Well, kind of.
You see, consolidation puts a massive burden on a single piece of hardware—especially in large organizations. You’ve placed all your business printing “eggs” in one fragile basket, creating a single point of failure. That leaves your print environment vulnerable. If you want to ensure high print availability, you’ve now got to take that simplified infrastructure and augment it with additional servers for redundancy’s sake. That’s more hardware, more maintenance, more cost.
A new set of problems emerges if that consolidated print server is located offsite. Print jobs now have to cross the WAN, which means competing for bandwidth with Internet and cloud traffic. And, once again, availability is at risk. When—and that’s when, not if—the WAN connection is interrupted for any reason, printing has to stop until it’s resolved. That puts productivity at stake.
When you eliminate print servers with PrinterLogic, you get the benefits of a consolidated print environment without these single points of failure.
What about distributed print environments?
If you’re clinging to legacy printing solutions like print servers and you haven’t chosen to consolidate, then you’ve likely taken the opposite route. You’re running print servers at several—or all—of your locations.
Here, too, that choice is supported by an understandable rationale. Running more print servers helps to localize problems when they arise. It limits overall dependency on a single server. It reduces the amount of print traffic crossing the WAN.
But at what cost? With every print server you add to your environment, you’re adding to the management overhead. You’re spending more time and money on upgrades, oversight and maintenance. You’re bulking up the infrastructure when every best practice is saying that you should be slimming down.
In the end, instead of a nice, tidy, compartmentalized print environment, you wind up with a fragmented printing solution that limits visibility and takes more effort to administer.
PrinterLogic allows you to eliminate every last one of those print servers while keeping resilience and productivity high.
Migrating to PrinterLogic is seamless and quick
Regardless of whether your server-based print environment is consolidated or distributed, you can implement PrinterLogic to maximize the strengths of your preferred configuration and overcome its weaknesses. That’s what makes PrinterLogic the best choice among any of the available enterprise printing solutions.
Along with the ability to eliminate print servers, PrinterLogic:
- Has a powerful automated migration tool that lets you transfer existing printer objects quickly and easily
- Offers centralized management via its intuitive admin console—for total control from a single pane of glass
- Empowers end users with a user-friendly self-service printer installation portal
- Integrates seamlessly with VDI solutions such as Citrix, Windows Virtual Desktop and VMware
- Enables targeted printer deployments without the need for GPOs or scripts
Australia’s Hospital and Medical Benefits System, or HAMBS, faced just about every business printing hurdle an organization could face. They had a geographically distributed customer base. They’re a dedicated Citrix shop. They’re tightly bound by healthcare regulation. They even had multitenancy needs.
By implementing PrinterLogic, HAMBS drastically cut its time spent on print management, increased its administrative oversight and created a consistent print environment that its funds and end users love. Read the case study here.
Put the days of print server frustration behind you. PrinterLogic is leading the next generation of printing solutions, making it possible to completely eliminate print servers—and with them, a major resource drain on IT.