Cirrato White Paper. Cirrato Technologies AB Vasagatan Stockholm, Sweden +46 (0)

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1 Cirrato White Paper

2 Table of Contents Printing environment redesigned... 3 Issues affecting printing and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)... 3 Requirements and challenges... 3 Traditional print technology... 4 The solution Cirrato... 4 Outline of Cirrato solution... 4 Application overview... 5 Cirrato server... 5 Centralized print management... 5 Modules in the Cirrato system... 6 Follow Print... 6 Quota... 6 Security... 7 Surveillance... 8 Driver handling... 8 Rule set... 8 Enhanced printing features... 9 Statistics... 9 Client application The printout Cirrato inventory and migration Summary Strategic redeployment of internal resources Cost visibility Improved productivity Return On Investment (ROI) Summary Conclusion Notes Trademarks and specifications About Cirrato Technologies Contact us

3 Printing environment redesigned Managing large volumes of printed and digital output from disparate systems to diverse destinations is a complex and error-prone task. Standard print management capabilities are usually basic and platform-specific, leading to problems with integration, administration, and network management. These problems are further compounded by the introduction of new electronic delivery channels. Operational efficiency gains and print cost reductions are offset by implementation costs, higher administration overheads, and printer problems. Business is increasingly competitive, and keeping control of costs is critical to success. Printed documents are fundamental to business, today and for the foreseeable future. Gartner research has found that knowledge workers waste up to 8 hours per week as a result of information delivery inefficiencies. Gartner also found that most organisations underestimate the cost of printing by 30 50% because their calculations only include obvious hardware and consumable charges. Printing has become a costly area of IT operations for today s large enterprises. In general, the requirements boil down to being able to deliver application print data over IP networks to local and remote printers. The demands on speed, reliability, efficiency and control naturally vary depending on the nature of the print data. A company with an occasional need to print out hardcopies cannot be compared with a bank or insurance company printing large volumes of checks and/or invoices. Many professionals in large enterprises find the actual cost associated with printing surprisingly high. Very few realize just how much they are spending on printing and, more importantly, are not aware of what can be done to reduce these costs. Studies by independent market analysts indicate that few network managers and IT departments track printing costs at all. By carefully evaluating the total cost of printing and other hardcopy solutions, plus costs for supplies and support, any enterprise can establish a correct base for a plan to significantly reduce these costs. Issues affecting printing and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) A number of trends drive hardcopy costs in today s large enterprise. Understanding these trends can help an enterprise determine what contributes to high costs in its specific environment. Requirements and challenges A number of different technologies have surfaced through the years fulfilling the demands above to different levels. From methods that simply forward entire print packets encapsulated in TCP/IP, to sessions on host systems that convert data to ASCII and make use of standard TCP/IP print methods; all with their own advantages and drawbacks. Although a lot of effort has been made trying to make improvements, there is still no method available besides Cirrato that will fully match all aspects of printing and TCO. 3

4 Traditional print technology In a traditional print environment, documents are first sent over the network from the client to the spool server. After being queued the print job is sent a second time, from the spool server to the printer. Before being sent from the client, the document is converted into print data which are several times larger than the original document. It is not uncommon for documents containing pictures or colored items to grow up to 10 times when converted to print data. All this data then has to go through the network twice. Print data can make up a surprisingly large percentage of an enterprise s network traffic. The amount of print data can even stress the local network; this becomes even more apparent if the client, printer and spool server are not geographically located at the same place and the print data must be sent over WAN links. Also, if the spool server becomes temporarily unavailable, all printing comes to a full stop since every print job has to pass through it. The solution Cirrato Implementing Cirrato addresses known problems in enterprise printing environments. Cirrato captures output from any source and assures delivery to any printer or electronic destination without any programming effort. Cirrato provides central control and document/device status alerts, for proactive problem identification and resolution producing custom auditing, accounting, and statistics. Outline of Cirrato solution The system consists of three major components: ticket server client application management GUI The client application asks the server to issue a small ticket that is used to track the created print job. With the ticket, the print job is then queued in the same way as it would be in a normal print environment, but the actual file to be printed is not sent to the server. It remains located only on the client, saving bandwidth between client and ticket server. When the printer becomes available for the specified print job, the client is notified and sends the print job directly to the printer. After printing has finished the client sends statistics data to the server. If the Cirrato server becomes temporarily unavailable, print jobs can still be sent to printers as usual. The client saves generated statistics and sends them to the printer once it is back online. 4

5 Application overview Cirrato server The Cirrato solution is resource effective and very powerful, making it possible to consolidate print spool servers with a ratio of 100:1. Each Cirrato server can handle up to 20,000 printer queues. The Cirrato server application runs on a Windows Server 2008 system and is based on a set of modules; key modules are listed below in this document. The new technology introduced in Cirrato makes it possible to print directly to printers using the local network while maintaining the ability to manage printers centrally with proactive monitoring for maintenance, thus minimizing downtime and user intervention. Centralized print management The Cirrato printing solution centralizes printer driver management. This is done by storing and managing the printer drivers in the Cirrato system centrally as well as cached locally on the clients, to speed up reinstallation of driver compatible printer models. Since there are fewer servers to monitor, fewer resources are needed to perform the monitoring. 5

6 The central costs for an IT department are difficult to measure. One of the reasons for this is the difficulty to assign print cost to the right place. The Cirrato embedded statistics function makes this easy. All costs can be assigned, down to page level, to the place from where the resource usage originated, including toner, paper, and ink cartridges. 1 Since costs are visualized in a new way, the task of rerouting resources to the correct place is easy. The possibility to implement a quota-based system for usage of high-end and expensive equipment ensures correct usage of systems. All printers, local or networked, are monitored in the Cirrato system. Cirrato can even work together with existing systems. This means the rollout of Cirrato can be handled in a controlled manner when the organization is ready to adopt the new printing system. Migration of Active Directory printers already present on workstations is easily done through the built-in migration tool. Local printers can also be integrated into Cirrato management. This gives organizations the ability to supervise and collect statistics from local printers in the same way as is done for networked printers, and can eliminate the need of unnecessary printers. Administration is handled through a Microsoft Management Console snap-in and through a web interface. Modules in the Cirrato system Follow Print Cirrato introduces several new ways of handling Follow Print printing. Advanced solutions with a graphical user interface on the printers allow the user to perform a variety of tasks (selecting which jobs to print, how many copies, etc.). Easy, user-friendly solutions are also possible to implement. An example of an easy to use solution would be for the user to simply swipe a personal ID card at any Follow Print printer to initiate printout of all the users current print jobs in the Follow Print queue. Auto-registration or LDAP/ODBC source The task of administrating Follow Print users can be greatly simplified by allowing users to register themselves. When a new user swipes an unregistered ID card at a Follow Print printer, it responds by printing a web address and a unique password; the user then enters that password at that web page to register the card for Follow Print use. Follow Print redundancy Follow Print architecture negates the standard Cirrato feature that clients can go on printing even if the ticket server goes down. Instead, if the server becomes unavailable in a Follow Print environment, an onscreen message is displayed with a list of printers on which the client has successfully printed jobs before. The user can then manually select a printer from the list and use if for printing until the server comes back online. Quota Currency based quota Currency based quota allows administrators to track costs more precisely by adding a currency quota to each printer queue, and to each kind of printout. For instance, an A3 color printout will cost more than an A4 black-and-white duplex printout on the same queue. 1 6

7 Transferring of quota between users Enabling multiple users for instance, each project member within a school project to contribute with their quotas to share the costs between each other. Logging print jobs to a specific client debit account This is the possibility to tie printouts to a specific client debit account, making it easier to track costs per client. Each Cirrato user can have several client debit accounts. When a printout is made the user can choose which client debit account to log the current print job to. These logs are stored in the Cirrato database and can be used later for invoicing. Payment system The Cirrato system can be connected with external PayEx accounts for instant payment per executed job. Security Secure print jobs Encrypted print jobs (on supported devices only) eliminate the possibility to eavesdrop the network to acquire sensitive/classified information. The print job is not printed until the one-time password a unique PIN code for said document has been entered on the panel or sent to the Cirrato server through an IVR interface. Blocking unauthorized print jobs IP blocking strengthens the quota module by ensuring that no unauthorized print jobs will be printed on network printers. Kerberos/LDAP/ODBC authentication Cirrato supports Kerberos as well as LDAP or ODBC for authentication on clients, and supports user authentication on non-domained clients. CSHOP The Cirrato Scan Handover Point feature (CSHOP) enables MFP-to-server communication such as scan to folder options without compromising system security. With CSHOP, documents can be scanned to users home folders without any contact between MFP and network server, efficiently preventing possible risks caused by the security level of the MFP. OCR integration CSHOP also supports Optical Character Recognition. Any compatible MFP that has OCR scanning capabilities can be used for such with CSHOP. 7

8 Surveillance SNMP monitoring SNMP monitoring allows the system administrator to add custom MIB objects. This adds more value to the proactive surveillance and service functions of Cirrato. SNMP traps The Cirrato server can receive SNMP trap notification messages directly from the printers, making it possible to passively monitor Cirrato printers. Action plans and alarm features Cirrato includes configurable action plan and alarm features, including the possibility to dispatch alarms selectively. Error traceback Cirrato can, if needed, backtrace events prior to an incident helping the administrators to locate errors in the printing system. Driver handling Managing drivers and settings Cirrato can store the default settings for all printer queues, removing the need to manually configure each printer set up on the client computers. If a printer is physically reconfigured (for instance, a sorting device is fitted) a new configuration file needs to be created and will be pushed out to all client computers that have that particular printer installed. The configuration update is automatic, and occurs when the user tries to print using that particular queue for the first time after an updated configuration file has been made available on the server. Different driver languages are also supported. Using several drivers for one printer In many cases, there are reasons to use different printer drivers on the same physical printer. Cirrato can manage several different printer drivers for each physical printer, while maintaining the queue functionality so that print jobs get printed in the same order as they where queued. Rule set Rule sets With Cirrato ACL (Access Control Lists) rule sets, administrators can set up different kinds of unique rules affecting users, groups of users, printers, or sets of printers. For example, a rule can be set that a particular group of users are not allowed to make printouts larger than 50 color pages per print job. 1 8

9 Enhanced printing features Duplication The Cirrato system is able to duplicate the last print job, either by APIs towards Interactive Voice Response (IVR) or through a Graphical User Interface. The user can print one copy of a document and after verifying that the printout looks as expected, can use his or her cellphone to request additional copies. The Cirrato server then contacts the computer that printed the user s last print job and instructs it to print the additional copies. Persistence It is possible to set print jobs to persistence mode, to override TTL (Time To Live) and other attempts to remove or block a print job. Redirection of print jobs Print costs can be reduced by the possibility to deny or redirect large printouts on high cost-per-page printers. This is made possible by setting a max cost (in currency) for a print job on a specific printer queue. When an expensive printout is requested, Cirrato will inform the user that the print job is not allowed and can suggest another, more suitable printer queue Statistics Per printer statistics Cirrato generates detailed statistics, down to the paper format used on each printer for each print job. 9

10 Client application The Cirrato client is run as a service installed under Microsoft Windows 2000, Microsoft Windows XP Professional, Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Microsoft Windows Server 2008, Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2, Microsoft Windows Vista or Microsoft Windows 7. The Cirrato client can also be run on MacOSX (version 10.5 or higher), Solaris x86, Solaris Sparc, and Linux Ubuntu. The printers created on the client appear as normal Windows printers and are used in the same way. From a user s point of view, nothing is changed compared to normal printing. The client interface is optional but can be used to give more extensive information to the enduser regarding the user s queued print jobs. The client interface will, if configured, act silently in the background producing pop-up messages when needed. The interface also enables the end-user to perform a variety of tasks such as managing queues or redirecting print jobs to a driver compatible printer model. The end-user can instantly get a status overview of the installed printers, shown in real time. The client also supports a variety of languages. The printout When a print job is initiated on a client machine, the Cirrato client first contacts the Cirrato ticket server asking for permission to print on a specified printer. The ticket server looks up the user and verifies that the he or she has permission to print on that printer. The server also checks if the user has enough quota left (if a quota system is used) and the printer drivers loaded on the client machine are verified and deployed. If the print job is allowed, the print server issues a ticket number that is sent to the client, enabling the client to spool the print job to the local hard drive. The print job is spooled and the client tells the server that the print job is ready to be sent to the printer. When the server finds a ticket that is first in queue to a specified printer, the server tells the client that it can start printing. The Cirrato client opens a TCP/IP connection (either to a raw port or using LPR) to the printer and starts sending the print job, and also notifies the ticket server that printing has commenced. If there is a problem connecting to the printer and/or sending the print job to the printer, the client contacts the ticket server which adds the printer for immediate check by the monitoring application. After a successful printout, the client reports to the ticket server the number of pages that were printed. The ticket server sets the queue as available for new print jobs to be printed, and logs the statistics from the print job in the database. Cirrato inventory and migration The built-in inventory tool collects information about printers installed on client computers and sends it to the server. The inventory tool can be used when migrating from a non-cirrato print system to get a complete overview of all models and queues that are currently in use. This information is later used to make the migration semi-automatic. The Cirrato web GUI provides a checklist/wizard functionality using this information. Cirrato inventory can be run by an administrator/user or invoked via login scripts, and is able to discover both local and mapped network printers. 10

11 Summary Reduce your network traffic Consolidate your servers Fewer resources to administer print systems Track your spending Easy installation/configuration with interactive tools Local printer support included with the same possibilities as networked printers Statistics available on locally attached printers Patented Strategic redeployment of internal resources Cirrato relieves internal IT personnel for purchasing and managing equipment and supplies. It also eliminates the need for end-user support personnel to spend a disproportionate amount of time on trivial tasks, allowing them to work in a more proactive manner. Cost visibility Enterprises that outsource their entire printing solution no longer have to calculate hardcopy costs themselves, but can choose to receive regular statements detailing these costs. They can then use this information as a basis for decision making; to evaluate printing fleet uptime, printout statistics, and resource utilization. 1 Improved productivity An enterprise that chooses to outsource the maintenance of its hardcopy assets is assured of having a planned fleet of well maintained, up-to-date equipment. This can help to improve productivity through: Elimination of print failures Reduced demand on helpdesk resources regarding printing Strategic placement of equipment for more efficient use in cooperation with Multi Function Printers and access to the latest features and functions associated with new equipment. Return On Investment (ROI) Rapid payback, low risk implementation, Cirrato solutions are quick to implement in weeks, not months, so any enterprise can start reaping the benefits sooner rather than later. 11

12 Summary Allow Cirrato technology to make your business more competitive, by turning imagination into reality. There has never been a better time to make this happen. Print solutions that meet the networking requirements of today and tomorrow. Cirrato is a breakthrough in output technology that is designed to form a integral component of a total IT strategy. Built on a robust, scalable, and secure architecture that consistently out-performs other products, Cirrato manages the information supply chain from document creation to printing, all from a single point of control. Conclusion The cost of printing in today's large enterprise is likely to be far more than the enterprise realizes. To accurately calculate hardcopy TCO, the enterprise must take into account a variety of factors for both direct and indirect costs. Gartner has defined these factors in terms of specific cost categories and cost elements. A calculation of TCO based on common cost categories can serve as a sound basis for a plan to reduce printing costs. 1 Depending on external factors such as accuracy of vendor-supplied printer drivers. 12

13 Notes Gartner, Managing Office Document Output in the Digital Era, J. Lundy, October Gartner, CEO and C10 Alert: Nine Ways to Cut Costs and Save E- Business Initiatives, K. McGee, May Lyra Research, Network Printing in Corporate Environments Part 2: Cost of Ownership Awareness and Concern, D. Rocheleau, October CAP Ventures Ltd., Digital Convergence and Total Cost of Ownership, Drivers, Development and Dangers, March Gartner, custom research commissioned by HP, March Hewlett-Packard Digital Workplace Services, Distributed Print Services customer studies, Giga Information Group, Printing Your Own Money: Workgroup Printer vs. Personal Printer Operating Costs, D. Friedlander, February Gartner, Rightsizing Output Fleets: The Hidden Goldmine, J. Lundy, March Trademarks and specifications All trademarks and registered trademarks mentioned in the document are the property of their respective owner. Technical specifications are subject to change without notice. Reproduction, adaptation or translation without prior written permission is prohibited except as allowed under the copyright laws. About Cirrato Technologies Cirrato Technologies develops software that improves performance of IT, lowers administration overhead and offers much needed functionality. Cirrato products are based on patent pending Cirrato technology, which integrates cost efficient, compatible and streamlined network and web server capabilities into any architecture. The technology is optimized in order to deliver superior cost efficiency, multi-vendor compatibility and ease of use, compared to general purpose servers. Founded in 2002, Cirrato Technologies started to develop Cirrato. Since then, the company has been focusing on expanding to common platforms for almost any company entity. Cirrato Technologies is privately held and has an international presence through close relationship with partners in the USA, the UK and Ireland that form strategic alliances. Cirrato products are only sold through a network of distributors, resellers, and partners. Contact us For more information on our enterprise print solutions, please send us an at info@cirrato.com or have a look at our product offerings at 13