RE: [SAGE] Servers per SysAdmin

[Tristan Ball <tristanb@vsl.com.au>]

I Totally agree. It also depends a great deal on how you've defined your 
system administrators job role.

In an environment where you have 100 servers, you probably have a dedicated 
Network Admin, or Team, and dedicated System Admin, or Team, Probably the 
same for each of your major applications.

We're a medium size engineering company, with about 25 servers accross 5 
sites. I'm the only official sysadmin within the company, but my job also 
includes network support, wan and lan, second/third level desktop support 
and mentoring for the desktop support team. (3 years PC support experiance 
will haunt me to my grave!).

Our server mix is also highly varied, NT, Solaris, Linux, Digital Unix, and 
our server application mix equally varied, everything from WU-FTP and 
Apachie, through to Rational Clearcase and Oracle. I have at least a basic 
working knowledge of all of it, and usually, more than that.

The idea of being asked to maintain 100 servers fills me with a fear that I 
cannot begin to describe!

:-)

T.

At 01:58 PM 10/9/2001, Jeff Horwitz wrote:
>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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