Network Printer connected to Server or Switch

I am just looking for some opinions on network printer. I am wondeirng if people think it is better to connect a printer to the server (e.g by USB) and share it for all users on network. Or whether it is best practice to connect the printer (via ethernet) to hub/router/switch and share it that way.

Your advice would be a great help.

Griffmaster

 

If a printer has a RJ45 network port (which in effect means it has its own built in printer server), I would always connect it to the network rather than to the server via USB.

Where you connect it depends on the network and the group of users who use it.

• SOHO with only a router with a built in switch. No choice. Connect it to the router.
• Small network with seperate router and a switch. Connect it to the switch.
• Medium to large network, workgroup printer. Connect to the switch closest to the workgroup.
• Medium to large network, printer everyone uses. Connect to a central switch.
• Medium to large network, printer managed by server Probably a good argument for getting the printer close to the server.

Whether you manage it via your Windows servers is more open to debate. Using Windows to manage the printing has advantages such as easy installation on client PCs and easier central administration of users. But good quality business laser printer have some fairly sophisticated management software that is at least as good as the windows system. Letting the printers manage themselves is a simpler set up, and in networks simple often means more reliable. However, I think relying on the printer management system does tend to mean you need to stick to one printer manufacturer, which is limiting. I don't think there is a right answer here. Choose the option that best fits the way you want to run your network.

 

At the moment its connected to the router (RJ45) which will be replaced by a switch. I just wasnt sure if it was worth using the Printer Management that SBS 2003 provides as the printer does have a USB also. We are only 4 users (soon to be 6) who print often, but will be looking to replace printer with a better one (higher ppm, more capacity etc) so was wondering if I should choose one to be connected to the switch and managed itself, or to get one that Windows server can manage.

Thanks for your advice

 

. Small network with seperate router and a switch. Connect it to the switch.
. Medium to large network, workgroup printer. Connect to the switch closest to the workgroup.
. Medium to large network, printer everyone uses. Connect to a central switch.

Could you explain how these preferenes were drawn? It should make no difference which switch as long as you do not exceed ethernet cable limits.

 

On a network with multiple switches, the slowest part of the network is the connection between the switches.

A switch has a backbone within it, which is in effect a very fast network. On a perfect switch the backbone is able to handle the maximum traffic from all the ports simultaniously. So a 24 port 100Mb/s switch would have a backbone that will communicate at 2.4Gb/s. However, most switches actually don't quite hit this level because the likelihood of all ports having full load simultaniously is quite low. Even so the speed of a switch backbone is always many times greater than that of an individual port and often in the Gb/s order. In a large network, the backbone speed is often a good indication of how well a switch will behave in high load conditions. The backbone speed is often a key difference between cheap and expensive switches.

The speed and capacity of the switch backbone ensures that when one device connected directly to a port on that switch, connects to another device connected directly to a port on that switch, its communication will not be throttled by it having to share the connection with traffic between other ports.

If you have two switches and connect them via a normal network connection, that connection is a bottle neck. For example, if two devices on switch one are simultaneously trying to send traffic at 100Mb/s (200Mb/s in total) to two devices on switch two, the 100Mb/s connection between the switches is not able to handle all that traffic. It has to slow the traffic from the sender and the effect is that each communication is limited to less than 50Mb/s each.

Therefore, if you have a workgroup of ten users connected to a single switch and you have a workgroup printer that is mainly used just by those ten users, you should connect the printer to the same switch. With this arrangement, any of the ten users can send traffic to the printer without that traffic causing any loss of network performance to any other user on the network.

If you connect the printer to another switch, any print traffic sent to that printer will have to go over the interconnection bottleneck. So during printing the bandwidth available over that connection will be reduced for other users.

If everyone uses the printer, you have little choice but to connect it to the core switch. If you connect it to a workgroup switch, that workgroup will suffer reduced network speed to the rest of the network while the printer is used.

 

Thank you.

On the network you describe, the main bottle neck is the internet connection. This is always lower capacity than your internal network. As soon as you add a switch, you are best moving as many users to the new switch as you can. Also move the printer to the new switch.

With this arrangement all LAN traffic will go over dedicated connections (directly between a computer/printer and the switch) and the switch backbone. The only traffic going over the router to switch connection will be traffic destined for the internet. That traffic is throttled by the low bandwidth connection between the router and your ISP, and therefore will always be less than the capacity between the router and the switch.

This means if I had a fully populated eight port router and wanted to add a switch, I'd look to buy at least a 16 port switch.

However, I should add that if you only have eight computers, you would have to work hard to put enough load on the network to have a problem with the less efficient arrangement (splitting users/printer over both the router and switch). For most SOHO (small office, home office) networks, it isn't going to have a huge affect unless you are regularly moving large files around.

If you have ten or more users, or need to squeeze the most out of your network, then it is worth looking at your network topography and minimising the bottlenecks most users have to transmit over during their network usage.

 

Three comments:

"On a perfect switch the backbone is able to handle the maximum traffic from all the ports simultaniously. So a 24 port 100Mb/s switch would have a backbone that will communicate at 2.4Gb/s. "

And similar claims. You no matter what have a many-to-one, whether on the backbone or using cable between switches. The bandwidth is 100mbs at full duplex and not less and not more.

Secondly, we are talking printers. Show me one that is bottlenecked in the three scenarios asked about:

. Small network with seperate router and a switch. Connect it to the switch.
. Medium to large network, workgroup printer. Connect to the switch closest to the workgroup.
. Medium to large network, printer everyone uses. Connect to a central switch.

I have never seen a printer capable of being "bottlenecked" even by your claim of 50mbs connections.

Finally, in most SOHO settings the router is also a switch. There is no reason to set up the straw man claim that the printing would occur on the WAN side of the router just because the workstations are connected physicly to a router.

 

No - the bandwidth of traffic passing in and out of the ports is "100mbs at full duplex and not less and not more ". The switch itself has to operate internally much faster to be able to maintain those bandwidths across all its ports.

Have a look at the specification of this HP switch. This 10/100 switch has a switching capacity of 9.6Gb/s. That is the bandwidth that the internal workings of the switch can handle. The backbone within the switch has to be able to handle this bandwidth if the traffic between two ports isn't to be affected by the traffic between two other ports. Or have a look at this Cisco switch spec. Table 2 two-thirds down the page. "32 Gbps switching fabric (Catalyst 2960G-24TC, Catalyst 2960G-48TC) "

Many users sending print jobs to a printer over a single 100Mb/s at the same time may well cause a performance drop. However, more importantly, if someone is hogging the connection between switches doing something like transferring a 1Gb of data, your printing will be slowed down if you also need to pass your print job over the same link at the same time.

I think you have miss-read what I wrote. I did not suggest that printing would be done on the WAN. The situation I was describing was where users were on one switch and were connecting to a printer attached to the router by its switch port. That is that to connect to the printer the route looked like this:

[Use_PC]=100Mb/s_link=[Switch]=100Mb/s_link=[Router]=100Mb/s_link=[Printer]

 

And the amount of other traffic on the network.

One way to think of it is that the switch is a concentrator. It takes all the traffic coming in on all its ports and handles it all and then pushes it out again.

Perhaps this will help

User1===[ s ]
User2===[ w ]
User3===[ i ]====[switch 2]==resources connected to switch 2
User4===[ t ]
User5===[ c ]
User6===[ h ]

Switch 2 can be a dedicated switch or the switch ports of a router. All the traffic for all the users accessing the resources connected to switch 2 have to pass over the single connection between the two switches. That's potentially 600Mb/s of traffic.

If you put the printer on the left hand switch, printing won't have to contend with this potential over capacity on the switch to switch connection.

As I stated earlier, on a small network the effect is going to be small. But as you scale up you need to think about these potential bottle necks.

 

It is not true that the only way to connect switches is with Cat5 or similar cable.

. There is 1gb cable connections
. There is fiber
. There are switches whose backplane is externally extensible
. There are extensible switches

Read: The effect is non-existent when the target device in all of this is a printer. This is a very low bandwidth network peripheral.

Spend more time concerned with the placement of your servers than your printers. Locate your printers close to where they will be used and worry about better things than optomizing their physical port connections.

 

I think that proves my point. If the network speed everywhere was the same you wouldn't need these special fast interconnects to overcome the bottlenecks.

For a small business, users printing out large reports, colour brochures and the like, can generate a lot of of network traffic.

Yes, I agree with that. Server location is more important.

Unless you want to optimize your network performance. You only have to do it once, so locate the printer in the best place and then forget about it.

 

What an optomistic way to view that your point is made moot by these connection types.

In addition, some backplane extensions are there more to avoid high hop counts than fears of bottlenecks.

 

I'm always optimistic when I know I'm right.

High hop count isn't a big issue with switches as each connection in itself comprises a single ethernet bus. Hop counts were a big problem with hubs, where all ports shared the same bus, and therefore latency over one device effected the rest of the shared network.

We still return to the fact that if the connection bottleneck between switches wasn't an issue manufacturers wouldn't have to develop special high speed interconnects such as stacking interconnects (backplane extensions) and teamed uplinks.