PaperCut is designed to scale to 60,000+ users. To ensure reliability on networks of this size, network architects may adopt strategies including:

  • Clustering – building in redundancy by implementing a failover strategy.
  • Server load balancing – spreading tasks across multiple servers.
  • Printer load balancing – spreading print jobs among printers.

Clustering

PaperCut is a cluster compatible application. Clustering is supported under Windows (either Microsoft Cluster Server or Veritas Cluster Server) and Linux (such as via Linux-HA) at all levels of the application, including:

  • Clustering at the print spooler service layer by integrating with clustering services.
  • Failover based clustering at the Application Server layer using clustering services. (PaperCut’s Application Server is web and web services based, and hence can support other failover methods such as heartbeat driven DNS.)
  • At the database layer by utilizing cluster aware databases such as Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL or Oracle (PaperCut supports deployment on external databases).

Printer Load Balancing

Printer load balancing can also be implemented at different layers, including:

  • the hardware/network layer (otherwise known as clustering);
  • the operating system layer (known as printer pooling in Windows and Novell environments, and CUPS classes in Mac and Linux); and
  • within PaperCut itself.

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