Loadbalancer.org has worked with many companies to solve the problems they’re facing in their print environments. As print specialists, Loadbalancer.org understands that these environments can be complex, with multiple technologies and applications – so it brings these layers together to create systems that are reliable, highly available, and high-performing. Check out our Introduction to Load Balancing to better understand how load balancing works.
Loadbalancer.org and PaperCut – the ideal print partnership
Loadbalancer.org enables PaperCut customers to keep enterprise print environments flowing, by making them reliable and highly available. With us all now carrying mobiles, tablets, and laptops, printing has become harder than ever.
PaperCut is a print management solutions provider, and products, NG, MF and Mobility Print, empower organizations to take control of their printing, reducing waste and expense by tracking and monitoring print jobs, offering advanced print security and making bring your own device (BYOD) printing easy.
How It Works
Load balancing PaperCut requires an identical setup to that which you’d use for load balancing print servers – still over TCP, using SMB port 445. Once you have your print servers running through the load balancer, simply install the PaperCut Secondary Server application on those servers.
About the PaperCut Components
Application Server1 – the main application to administer reports, print costs, quotas, and other print-related actions.
Secondary Server (Print Provider, Mobility Print2) – reports to the application server, and updates user and print
info that it’s handled.
Site Server1 – placed on sites remote from the application and secondary print server locations (such as a regional
satellite office). In the event of a WAN outage, regional office users will continue printing via the site server (where
PaperCut replicates info from the application server). This enables them to continue to print jobs, authenticate at an
MFD in that office, and release their jobs.
In the event of an outage on the application server, the site server will take over to enable continued printing and reporting at that site.
1 Placing the application server or site server behind a network load balancer is not recommended. For details on PaperCut’s recommended deployment methods for the application and site servers, visit PaperCut’s Common Topics on Clustering and High Availability. Placing all secondary print servers behind a load balancer is recommended.
2 Mobility Print can be installed on secondary print servers to enable users to print from mobile devices (via network print services), and load balanced using TCP/UDP 53, 9163,9164 to make it highly available.
Benefits for PaperCut Customers
- Create a high availability (HA) architecture for zero downtime
- Optimize application traffic both locally and across multiple sites
- Failover servers without any impact on users
- Scale-up and down, mitigating the need for constant DNS and firewall configuration changes
- Simpler change controls
ecoprintQ is a leading authorized solution center. Experts in all things Loadbalancer and PaperCut, ecoprintQ is here to help you learn about loadbalancer, how it works with PaperCut, and give you all the reasons as to why and how it can benefit you. Contact us today by emailing us at sales@ecoprintq.com or give us a call at 800.236.8499.