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Enterprise Network Printing
January 20, 1999

Mainframe Printing Issues

The mainframes are dead, cried the industry experts. So why is mainframe-to-LAN printing so important? Many companies still depend on the big iron to run their core business applications. Users want to be able to get the same quality of output and access to features when printing from the mainframe as they do when they print from local computer applications. And administrators do not want to purchase separate printers for mainframe and LAN printing.

The challenges of printing to LAN-based printers from a mainframe can be daunting. There are a number of issues to deal with, including physical connectivity, protocol connectivity and print job language configuration. To solve physical connectivity and protocol connectivity, there are a number of products out there, such as Levi, Ray and Shoup 's (http://www.lrs.com) VPS/TCPIP product. This tool allows data from JES spool to be sent to LPR/LPD compatible printers such as an HP JetDirect or Lexmark MarkNet printer. Another product from Barr Systems, called PRINT/GATE, allows mainframe output to be routed to a Novell print queue.

To deal with print job language setup issues, you have several options. You can embed PostScript or PCL commands in the print job stream to control the layout of the document. You can purchase or write your own print driver for the mainframe as well, or, there are some products that will allow you to configure print queues that contain header commands that are sent in front of the printer. A similar technique is used by the DataProducts Typhoon printers, which allow you to set up a variety of virtual print queues, each with its own specific configuration. For example, a print queue named PLGLTR12 could have a default settings of portrait, legal paper and Times Roman 12 point font.

Enterprise Printing and NOS Selection

Which NOS is best for supporting enterprise print services? The answer is, it depends. It makes no sense to deploy a Linux server as a print server if your enterprise is made up of NetWare and Windows NT. Nor does it make sense to deploy an NT print server in an all Unix environment. All of the major NOSes provide adequate print services. However, NetWare extracts less overhead and requires fewer resources as a print server. For example, you can deploy an old 486 or low-end Pentium with 16 MB as a NetWare 3.x print server, but you'll need at least a Pentium 90 or 120 and 48 MB of RAM to run Windows NT as a print server. That said, for those seeking a very cost effective approach, installing Linus on a $2,000 Pentium Pro servers makes good sense.