RE: [SAGE] Servers per SysAdmin

[Todd Williams <twilliams@answerfinancial.com>]

> The suits are quoting some Gardner Group article stating one SysAdmin
> per hundred servers

First of all, it's the Gartner Group.   with a "t".
For some reason, suits are required to mindlessly quote them every so
often.  (It must be the managerial lobotomy they go thru).  In many ways,
Gartner is worse that Microsoft in the way that certain people in power
mindlessly trust them, no matter what they say.

Their power to destroy companies or other entities as a self-fulfilling
prophecy of what they say is just too scary.

There is no magic formula or number.
There are a huge number of factors that are involved in the equation.
Depending on what the servers are doing and what you expect the sysadmins
to do, the number probably varies from somewhere between 1000+ to 0.25
servers per admin.  The former would be a very heterogeneous group of
servers with very little complexity.  The latter might be a bleeding-edge
supercomputer requiring constant care and feeding 24x7 (i.e. 3 shifts).

You might politely ask them for the article they read, or the case study
that was discussed.

-Todd