Moderately high volume printing on Solaris

Moderately high volume printing on Solaris

Post by Tony Fitzgera » Fri, 18 Apr 1997 04:00:00



I want to get suggestions as to what other sites use for moderately high
volume printing on the Solaris platform.  We are looking to phase out
our MVS system over the next few years and would like to move the
printing load off the MVS platform in the near rather than long term.

We are looking for something that would handle 60-80 pages minute duty
cycle for 8 hour shifts at peak demand with an average 100K pages/month.
The output doesn't have to be super high quality.  Price is a concern.

Presently, on the MVS platform we are using a 12 year old Mercurion
printer (Mercurion was bought out by NBS some number of years ago.)
We've got more than our money's worth out of the mercurions, however,
our technician is keeping the one remaining one in production by
*izing two other printers and liberal use of "duct tape".  One of
these days, it's going to break permanently and we would like to have an
alternative in place before that.

Getting print jobs from MVS to UNIX is no problem, we have a home grown
LPR client for MVS that makes UNIX print queues look like NJE remotes to
JES2 and it works well.

Features of the mercurion printers that we would like to see in the new
solution:

1. Selection of small or medium font in landscape mode allowing about
   160 or 132 columns/page respectively.

2. Selection of large, medium, small or APL fonts in portrait mode.
   (We could live without the APL font.)

3. Ability to pre-load a graphic/text form and print over it.

We have JES2 exits which automatically set up the printer for each job
based on JCL parameters and should be able to do the same with an LPD
filter since our LPR client sends the JCL information in a control
record and we're already doing a bit of this.

We're not tied to this exactly, a fast PostScript printer could be an
option, our filter would then just have to be a *LOT* smarter.  I
somehow suspect, though, that fast and PostScript aren't used together
very often.

We'd also like a bit more of the JES2 features that our operators are
familiar with.  Since these are large jobs, checkpoint restart on the
printing is crucial and decent forms and print priority handling would
be useful.

Our SUN salesman apologizes but says SUN doesn't really sell printing
solutions but that he will make inquiries.  I've already been in contact
with two companies who promise hardware/software solutions but would
like a little more choice:

IBM:  We've had a long and generally good relationship with IBM and if
      they can give us a cost effective solution we'd probably go with
      it.  The software, however, already has one strike in that it
      would require an AIX box and we've already determined that
      supporting multiple architectures should be avoided if possible.

PSI:  Peripheral Solutions Inc. out of Mississagua, Ont. is using the
      same print engine that is in our mercurion printers.  The software
      is supposed to support Solaris.  I've only received their proposal
      today and haven't had a chance to read it in detail.

So what do people do who have high volume printing requirements in the
UNIX environment?  We have been sending the larger print requests to the
MVS system in the past.
--

 
 
 

1. High speed/volume printing

I am curious as to what other UNIX shops are doing for high speed/volume
printing using forms (paychecks, W-2's, questionaires, etc).

We are currently dependent on a XEROX 4090 (90 pages/minute, 400,000
pages/month) which is hooked to a VMS machine (actually
VMS-->tape-->XEROX). Our UNIX boxes run a homegrown program to get files
to the VAX for spooling to the xerox.

Anybody out there doing this kind of printing directly from a UNIX box?

Later,
Davis

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