Sizing your InfoPrint Manager environment

The number of InfoPrint Manager servers you need depends on many factors. In this section, we provide only an overview of the most important performance issues that can influence your server purchase plans. To begin, the features and configurations of each InfoPrint Manager server system are extremely important. Important server factors that affect printing system performance include these:

  • Processor speed
  • Number of processors
  • Available RAM
  • Available hard disk space
  • Hard disk speed
  • Number of hard disk drives
  • Balance of InfoPrint Manager filesystems across available disk drives
  • Tuning specifications for hard disk drivers
  • Paging space allocations (drive locations and size)
  • Number of data paths (single or dual)

The output devices that InfoPrint Manager drives are also important:

  • Speed and resolution of printers or other output devices
  • Number of concurrent processes for each actual destination
  • Number of output devices per actual destination

Finally, how you submit print jobs to each InfoPrint Manager server is important:

  • Number of client systems submitting jobs
  • Frequency of job submission from client systems
  • Speed of network data transfer
  • Size (density) of jobs to be printed
  • Complexity of jobs to be printed
  • Number and types of input data streams
  • Overall network traffic

Sizing your InfoPrint Manager environment is a complex task. It might be impossible to determine in advance precisely how many AIX systems, Linux systems, and Windows systems will adequately serve your printing needs.

Note: You can run multiple InfoPrint Manager servers on one AIX system or Linux system, but you can run only one InfoPrint Manager server on a Windows system.

Your Ricoh sales representative can help you determine if you have enough physical printing devices to address the printing needs of your enterprise. Essentially, this is a question of how many pages of output must be produced in how much time. Your estimate of printed output, combined with the rated speeds of your print devices, should give you the information you require to guide printer purchases.

Determining how many servers you need to drive your printing devices, however, requires experimentation and patience. Consult with your Ricoh sales representative to agree on a reasonable number to start with.

Finally, it is important to monitor the performance of your printing environment regularly to see how the system reacts to actual usage and the changing needs of your business. InfoPrint Manager provides useful tools to make such monitoring easy. You can use standard accounting and audit logs to collect statistical data on jobs processed by any printing device in your environment. You can even customize these logging activities to suit the needs of your business. These logs provide invaluable information on workload balancing. You can also use these logs to determine billing procedures or simply to determine how resources are being used at your installation.

Note: The InfoPrint Manager server provides standard accounting logs, and you can also get customized accounting and audit logs with printers that use the PSF DSS.

Parent topic: Understanding the InfoPrint Manager server