Print Server vs. Direct IP Printing| PrinterLogic Blog

Deciding how to configure or maintain the printing environment always ends up being the system administrator’s headache. And the primary decision they need to make is whether they should set up print servers, or go with Direct IP printing. While there is no right or wrong choice between the two, each has its own benefits and downfalls.

Print Servers can offer your environment a handful of benefits. A few of them being:

Management of printers from a central location
Driver management
Print settings management
Print job auditing
Printer permissions
Job/queue management
Clustering and pooling of the printers

The benefits of print servers come at a cost though. You now have a single point of failure, the hardware is expensive, the software and licensing is expensive, and they can be high maintenance.

Direct IP printing has it’s own set of benefits, such as:

No single point of failure
Each computer maintains control of the print driver and settings
Print jobs use the local spooler
Low cost

While some the benefits of Direct IP are major, the price you pay to get those benefits could be enough to offset the idea of going the Direct IP route. You now have to manage the printers and drivers from each individual workstation, you no longer have print job/queue management, and you lose the ability to set printer permissions and priorities.

Learn how to eliminate the need for print servers while centrally managing Direct IP printing.

But what if there was a solution out there that gave you the benefits of a print server, while maintaining the stability and low cost of a Direct IP setup?

PrinterLogic offers a solution that eliminates the need for print servers while providing a way to centrally managing and install Direct IP printers. With PrinterLogic’s printer management solution, you can seamlessly convert your existing Microsoft or Novell print server environment over to Direct IP and manage all of the printers and drivers from a central administrator console that can be accessed from any computer on your network. Not only will you be able to manage your printers, you will also have numerous print job audit reports at your fingertips. To find out more about our solution, visit us at www.printerlogic.com for a demo and a free trial and see if it’s the right fit for you.