Re: [SAGE] Servers per SysAdmin

[Trey Harris <trey@usenix.org>]

As others have said on this list, a simple ratio of servers to admin is
misleading.  When I was at UNC, at one time we had a ratio as low as one
to one--but that was with some 20,000 users all trying to use two machines
and the machines were falling down so often because they were so
overloaded that you needed a full time person just to nurse it.  But my
gut feeling is that for a typical small site without much central
infrastructure and heterogeneous servers, 1:100 is high, and 1:50 or 1:25
is more realistic.

You also didn't say how large the total number of servers was.  When the
number gets large enough (into the thousands), I think you're better off
hiring a few system architects (that is, very senior sysadmins who have
development experience) to design and maintain a specialized
low-maintenance infrastructure that fits your needs.  

You'll still need sysadmins, but the ratio will be dramatically lowered if
the sysadmins are only putting out fires and handling hands-on work and
not having to worry about ongoing builds, patches, upgrades, etc., as
well.  Thinking of the sites I know of, with a strong architecture staff
you can get the ratio down to 1:600 or more with a homogeneous
environment, and 1:300 or so with a heterogeneous environment.  But this
is definitely not the "turnkey" or "shrinkwrapped" solution that types who
listen to Gartner tend to go for. :-)

-- 
Trey Harris
Secretary and Executive
SAGE -- The System Administrators Guild (www.sage.org)
Opinions above are not necessarily those of SAGE.