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Ricoh’s Serverless Print Solutions Eliminate Cost, Maintenance of Multiple Print Servers

by · May 4, 2017

This week, Ricoh Canada announced its “Serverless Print Solutions,” which it bills as “a new and unique approach to print management.”

Here’s how serverless-printing approaches work: With traditional servers, each time a user prints, the entire print file is sent to a print server, and then to the destination printer. This typically results in enterprises having to invest in multiple local print servers, creating extra administration, and if a server becomes unavailable, printing stops.

In contrast, with Ricoh’s Serverless Print Solutions, a single print server manages print drivers, printer queues, and printing policies across the entire print environment. By enabling a print architecture that doesn’t require print jobs to be sent through a local print server, challenges associated with heavy network print traffic, sporadically unavailable local print servers, and user support calls, can be avoided.

By providing a direct local print relationship between computer and printer, Ricoh’s Serverless Print Solutions is said to instantly reduce network-wide print traffic and increase available bandwidth.

Ricoh says this translates to an immediate reduction in the number of print servers required across an organization’s entire network, for a savings of about $6,000 per print server.

Benefits include:

  • Scale from a few print devices to several thousand;  IT staff can add new printers or users, modify individual printer functions, and/or add or change locations on the fly.
  • Reduces the IT burden needed to manage print servers.
  • Provides reporting features, including more than 100 Web-based reports, so that, for instance, IT can identify under-used printers.

Ricoh’s Serverless Print Solutions also provide security and compliance capabilities, allowing administrators to enforce best practices and user printing rules at both the global and local levels, even including devices connected via USB ports. The solution also supports card-based user authentication, which adds an additional layer of security.

For more information on Ricoh’s Serverless Print Solutions, visit the company here.

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