Posted by Andrew Miller
A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. You’ve probably heard that expression countless times throughout your life. From time to time you might have even used it yourself when discussing different IT scenarios where the weakest links, as you know, are single points of failure. Your enterprise print environment is no exception to that, of course. But how many print management solutions are robust enough to maintain the full strength of the IT chain?
Very few, as it happens, especially when you’re dealing with traditional print management solutions like print servers. Print servers are notorious for being the root cause of downtime across departments or even entire organizations. And they don’t even have to suffer a catastrophic hardware failure. Sometimes an issue as trivial as a driver conflict or an installation hiccup can bring print servers to their knees—along with all the printing activity they control.
To compensate for their inherent lack of robustness, most IT teams add a secondary print server to create redundancy. The problem with these backup servers is that they’re usually no different to the primary servers they’re meant to support. They’re prone to the same vulnerabilities and shortcomings. Furthermore, they effectively double the cost of print management given that your organization is now operating, maintaining and replacing two servers for every one that should be in place. So not only does print server redundancy fall short of true robustness, it also can get pretty expensive.
Most print management solution providers know that this is the unfortunate status quo, but it’s not in their interest to disrupt it. They’ll happily sell you another license and advise you to buy additional hardware. That doesn’t fundamentally address single points of failure in a print environment; it merely provides a false sense of security—to the detriment of your bottom line.
Unlike conventional print management companies, PrinterLogic provides a proven way to eliminate single points of failure in your print environment. In addition to being quick and easy to administer, our centralized print management solution was developed to be incredibly robust, offering rock-solid reliability and unprecedented enterprise-wide availability.
When using PrinterLogic as your print management solution, you can:
- Continue printing during a WAN outage: Because PrinterLogic relays print jobs directly from the workstations to the printers themselves, there’s no need for traffic to travel across the WAN.
- Print as usual following a host server failure: Should your host server go down for any reason, PrinterLogic’s built-in redundancy allows your end users to keep printing with no loss in performance or functionality.
- Achieve high print management availability: By configuring a warm standby server, you’ll still be able to manage printers enterprise-wide in the event your primary server were to fail.
Hardware fails. Software crashes. These are inevitabilities in any IT environment. But it’s not impossible to move beyond print servers, eliminating these single points of failure that are the weakest links in print management. Realizing round-the-clock robustness begins with implementing PrinterLogic as your print management solution.