It is often the case that an organisation with multiple offices has a centralised printing solution. There are several advantages of such a solution including reduced costs in licensing, administration and maintenance. However, such a solution generates a lot of network traffic, which may cause issues if the links between offices are low-bandwidth.
An organisation has users in a branch office. They have a centralised printing solution using Windows Server 2003 print services in their data-centre.
A user in a branch office is working on a MS Word document that is 41k in size and decides to print this in the local branch office printer. MS Word submits a job to the print server in EMF Format. This generates 12Mb of network traffic over CIFS that is used to generate a spool file on the print server.
The print server submits a PCL file to the printer in the branch office which is 41 Mb in size. This uses a network protocol which is dependent on the printer.
As demonstrated in the scenario above, significant network traffic can be generated for a relatively small print operation. The amount of traffic generated is dependent on the amount of raster data that a document contains, and therefore can vary widely for documents with the same file type.
It is not uncommon for high quality PDF files to generate several hundred Mb of network traffic when printing, so the amount of printer network traffic that can be generated from a small user base should not be under-estimated.
Deploying Replify Accelerator in a centralised printing environment has the following advantages:
In the table below are examples of the bandwidth savings that can be generated when using the Replify Accelerator with some typical file formats.
If you’re a vendor or end customer, you should be talking to Replify. We can help you make your products and services more compelling and more cost-effective – contact us here: sales@replify.com