Private Cloud - PaperCut and Printing - Industry Analysts, Inc.

Private Cloud is a popular and emerging trend in network management. More and more organizations are hosting internal network services on servers located in external Data Centers. Services hosted in the private cloud differ from the public cloud in that only users/devices on your internal network have access, not the public. Usually private cloud servers have internal IP addresses and are connected to your site via a secure VPN. Print servers and PaperCutare one of the services being increasingly moved into the virtual private cloud.

PaperCut is Private Cloud ready

PaperCut has been designed to be latency tolerant and is Private Cloud ready. Private Cloud solutions need to be efficient over medium latency networks. An example, on your local network a TCP round-trip may be measured in single milliseconds, while on a private cloud it may be measured at 100 milliseconds plus. PaperCutis architected to cope with large latencies through the following design points:

All administration is done via a Web Browser.
Inter-server and inter-client communication is via Web Services.
Embedded software running on MFDs use compressed Web Services where possible.
The Admin web interface makes use of caching where possible.

Example Use-Cases

There is a large variety of PaperCut customers using private cloud. This ranges from:

School districts hosting school print servers in centralized data centers (100+ schools).
Small businesses who don’t run any server-based infrastructural on site.
Corporations leveraging central services delivered via private cloud.

The decision to implement private cloud is not necessarily a function of an organization’s size. Rather it’s influenced by other motivations such as the skills of IT staff, and the future infrastructure objectives of the organization.

Tips and Tricks

The following is a collections of items we have found useful in considering when managing or deploying a cloud deployment.

Consider Bandwidth: The size of print jobs vary form organization to organization. For example, the size profile of a print job in a graphics design studio will be much larger than that of your typical office. This should be considered as part of your deployment planning. If you are already using PaperCut, you can use your print log data which will show you print job sizes.

Enforce QoS: IP networks have come a long way over the last ten years. Quality of Service can easily be enforced on your IP network to ensure high priority traffic is not affected by printing activity. This is usually done by de-prioritizing traffic sent to our originating from the server hosting your print queues or PaperCutdata.

Disaster Recovery and Management: Running services in the private cloud is often a new experience for organizations. You should review backup options provided by your private cloud provider. Like all good backup procedures they should be regularly reviewed, and disaster recover rehearsed. It is important not confuse private cloud with a fully managed service. You should also plan regular operating system and software updates.

VM Provisioning: Most private cloud solutions are hosted in a virtual machine environment. The following related guide may help in provisioning: Running PaperCut on a VM

Can you suggest a cloud hosting provider?

There are many companies out there offering private cloud solutions. PaperCut will work with any private cloud provider offering either Windows or Linux virtual servers. It’s not just the large well known providers such as Amazon Virtual Private Cloud. We find that many organization prefer private cloud solutions offered by their ISP provider or an ISP partner with local datacenters and support.