I don’t have much to add to Harper’s post on our TechCocktail presentation.
But I can add the rough math we did to compare costs for label printing:
Big Vendor solution:
Ginormous Canon Printer 110ppm - $150,000
(Redundancy? $300,000.)
Service - $1000/month
Print cost per page - $0.005
Part Availability - 10-12 days
skinnyCorp solution:
3 x HP 9040n’s 120ppm - $9,000 (and already redundant!)
Service - $195/month
Consumables - $700/month
Print cost per page - $0.0045
Part Availability - 4 hour on call response (Average response time <2 hours)
We also have Nagios querying the printers for Maintenance kit and Toner levels. When Maintenance kits are low, it pages a printer ninja for service.