Virtualization has been key in solving the modern problems facing the printing industry, John Judson, Senior Systems Analyst, Courier Corporation, told theCUBE host Stu Miniman at The Virtualization Technology Users Group (VTUG) in Massachusetts.

“Our challenge has been a transition from printing large runs of books to short runs,” said Judson. “And we’ve kind of met that challenge by going to inkjet printers and using virtualization to speed up the actual process with which we’re ripping apart PDFs and presenting them to the printer so they can get the book out the door.”

Courier uses inkjet printers “the size of a Volkswagen Beetle” to print books at rates of up to 450 feet of paper per second. “We have actual racks of blade servers whose sole purpose is figuring out when to turn the inkjet heads on and off,” said Judson. “We had to rethink our whole printing mentality.”

Judson explained that one of the new features of printing in the modern age is small-run textbooks that can be custom tailored to individual customers.

“The old model we had was constrained by the physical speed of the processors and the underlying disks that the application was relying on,” said Judson. “We were able to take that constraint and kill it with virtualization.”

Watch the full interview with John Judson here: