Background and Choosing the Right Technology
A major London law firm uses nQ Zebraworks’ PrintQ for its secure print environment. It chose PrintQ due to its reliability, the fact that it does not require custom components and that it allows users to retrieve prints quickly and securely via a swipe of their building access card, do touchless print release via their iPhone and print from anywhere simply by e-mailing documents into their PrintQ. The firm also appreciated nQzw’s understanding of the legal industry and its relationship with the firm’s chosen multi-function device (MFD) manufacturer.
Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery
Because printing is a key service for legal professionals and a disruption can lead to a loss of productivity and the inability to complete work, which can lead to a loss of billable time (or worse), two of the firm’s key requirements were to maintain a high uptime during normal operation and to provide failover capabilities to restore service quickly in the event of a server, datacenter or connectivity failure.
Exceeding user expectations for regular service reliability
nQzw designs for high service reliability from the ground up. PrintQ does not rely on any third-party Windows Spooler features or components, as they diminish print output and speed while creating instability and service faults. Instead, PrinQ leverages the MFD’s Global Print Driver, which provides users with the ability to fully utilize all of the MFD’s features while exceeding users’ expectations for printer service availability.
Ensuring business continuity in the event of a disaster
The firm utilizes VMWare to support its disaster recovery solution, replicating all changes to a backup data center supporting individual server failover, full-service failover involving multiple servers or an entire data center failover.
PrintQ has been designed from the ground up to support a wide variety of failover solutions including VMWare:
- PrintQ only uses standard Microsoft Windows components and native print drivers
- PrintQ does not rely on IP Addresses and only uses hostnames for all communication
nQzw worked with the firm to help define the replication strategy between their primary and backup data centers and supported the firm in ensuring the solution was installed and configured correctly in order to support failover. It also worked with the firm to test the disaster recovery failover and certify that each component becomes operational in the backup data center with no unacceptable data loss and that all services were fully functional after failover and during fallback.
The End Result
With nQ Zebraworks’ PrintQ, the firm was able to ensure its critical printing operations will remain up during normal times, and recover from disaster quickly and safely, enabling users to print within 15 minutes of a major data center outage.