Re: [SAGE] Servers per SysAdmin

[Wim Vandeputte <bunbun@reptile.rug.ac.be>]

On Tue, Oct 09, 2001 at 12:00:00AM -0400, Pat Lynch wrote:
> As we found out at OSDN, 2 sysadmins can handle 200 servers but you'll run
> them ragged doing so, I would say, honestly 50 per sysadmin, 30 if theres
> an on-call schedule.

I think you should also look at what kind of hardware you are depending
on, are we talking SUN hardware with a maintenance contract? Or El-Cheapo
Intel boxes? Rackmounted? Removable harddisks? Or plain PCs under desks 
with a cable mess coming out from them?

I see a higher failure rate on our Intel based boxes, ranging from 
dying power supplies (and these are dual powersupply rackmounted boxes)
to crashing disks (we got about 120 IBM *IDE* disks from that dreaded
Deskstar series, 10% have gone bad over the last 2 months).

The overhead from running around putting out small fires is taking
more and more time. I wish we could do without it ;-)

Wim.