Creating Highly Available Printing Environments

The importance of high availability in a print environment shouldn’t be news to anyone. End users need to print when they need to print. End of story. Otherwise, it’s just lost productivity.

And it isn’t just lost productivity for end users. When those users make a help-desk call or file a support ticket because their print job has vanished, there’s someone on the other end who has to address that issue. Now it’s lost productivity for two people, because IT folks should really be dealing with bigger stuff than printer issues.

All the same, creating a highly available print environment isn’t exactly easy when you’re using legacy IT printing solutions like print servers. To achieve high availability, most organizations end up adding infrastructure in the form of more print servers.

Some folks call this redundancy, but it’s more like mission creep. What it really amounts to is introducing backup single points of failure to cover the primary single points of failure. It’s also not cost-effective. It’s just more hardware and software to manage and maintain.

What high availability should (and can) look like
Imagine this: An end user is moved to a new department. She logs in for the first time on a different workstation, yet she automatically has access to all the nearby printers. This is all invisible to her, of course. All she knows is that she just clicked “Print” and successfully printed out a document on a printer down the hall—and without having to interact at all with the help desk.

Later in the day, there’s some trouble with the WAN connection. Looks like the ISP is having some temporary service issues. Yet, despite not being able to browse the Internet or access email, every user in the building is able to print as if nothing had changed. It’s all business as usual.

That’s what a highly available print environment looks like. Productivity is uninterrupted, printing is effortless and there’s close to zero downtime. But with traditional IT printing solutions like print servers or direct IP, both of those scenarios are hard to come by.

Create a highly available print environment with PrinterLogic
PrinterLogic makes those high-availability scenarios a matter of course. Our next-generation serverless print infrastructure actually eliminates print servers completely to achieve greater redundancy and resiliency in the print environment. That means your organization can bring about a print-infrastructure reduction at the same time as it increases print availability.

What makes this possible is PrinterLogic’s unique direct-IP printing platform. To deliver the optimal experience for end users and admins alike, we took the most straightforward, proven form of reliable printing and combined it with enterprise-wide administration from a single pane of glass. PrinterLogic unites direct-IP printing and centralized management to provide:

• Superior print management: Admins can monitor and manage the entire print environment—even in distributed organizations—from one central console. And the common driver repository makes it easy to stay on top of print drivers.
• Reliable location-based printing: Supplying mobile users with the right printers can be like trying to hit a moving target. PrinterLogic makes location-based printing easy and dependable.
• No GPOs, no scripts: Want to configure advanced deployments using specific variables? No problem. PrinterLogic integrates with Active Directory so printers can be deployed to users based on criteria like OU, container and group. All without group policy and custom scripts.
• Reduced infrastructure: With PrinterLogic, less is more. Our solution introduces incredible new features and stability to the print environment while minimizing infrastructure requirements.
• Self-service printer installation: Empower your end users to safely install their own printers by simply visiting web-based floorplan maps. Printers and associated drivers are installed with a single click.
• Optimized WAN usage: Because PrinterLogic creates direct client-to-printer connections, print traffic stays on the local network. Data-heavy print jobs no longer battle with vital network traffic for WAN bandwidth.

Tested in the most demanding print environments
PrinterLogic’s robustness and resilience aren’t just theoretical. Our solutions have been implemented in some of the most fast-paced and demanding print environments to provide availability that just wasn’t possible with legacy IT printing solutions.

A perfect example is the United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM). This is an enterprise-scale organization that got tired of conventional IT printing solutions not being up to snuff. Print servers just couldn’t deliver the uptime, flexibility, scalability and ease of management that USSOCOM achieved with PrinterLogic right from the start (read the case study here).

If you’d like to see firsthand how the USSOCOM and hundreds of other organizations created highly available print environments while also achieving significant print-infrastructure reduction, sign up today for a free demo of PrinterLogic. You can put it to the test for 30 days and see what high print availability and reduced print infrastructure can look like in your own organization.