RE: [SAGE] Servers per SysAdmin

["Jeff Horwitz" <jhorwitz75@yahoo.com>]

how many sysadmins does it take to screw in a light bulb....  :)

this is very misleading.  it depends what the servers are doing and the
experience of the administrator(s).  100 homogeneous servers all running the
same operating system, with centralized authentication and software
distribution mechanisms is very manageable with one or two senior
administrators.  20 servers running different operating systems on different
hardware platforms with varying capacity and performance requirements can be
more difficult to manage, and may require two or three administrators.  at
my current job, i alone administer 30 servers.  a couple years ago i was at
the university of michigan, where a team of myself and 5 other
administrators managed the same number of machines.  the complexity and
dynamic nature of the services we were offering (login services to 80,000
users!) required us to have more staff.

the moral of the story is, upper management cannot base their staffing
requirements on a simple formula.

-jeff

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-sage-members@usenix.org
[mailto:owner-sage-members@usenix.org]On Behalf Of Barnette, Steve L
Sent: Monday, October 08, 2001 8:00 PM
To: sage-members@usenix.org
Subject: [SAGE] Servers per SysAdmin


I am in a staffing discussion on number of SysAdmins needed for our servers.
The suits are quoting some Gardner Group article stating one SysAdmin per
hundred servers.  That sounds high to me, I was wondering what all of you
think?


Steve Barnette
Sr. Systems Engineer
-------------------------------------------------------
# perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5,(41*2),sqrt(7056),(unpack(c,H)-2),oct(115),10);




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