RE: [SAGE] Servers per SysAdmin

["Mark Verber" <mark@verber.com>]

As many people have noted, the number of sysadmin / servers depends
of a number of factors.  There are no magic ratios.  I personally
would very careful using numbers from the Gardner group.  My experience
with the Gardner group is that their positions seem to reflect theoretical
and/or marketing "white papers" rather than "in the trenches" data of
real deployments.

A few issues which will effect how many servers / admins include:

 - how homogeneous the machines are
 - dataless -vs- persistent storage: e.g. are these data-less
   workstations which are easily replace by doing a network install,
   complex HA database machines which host extremely valuable data
   which always have to be up, or machines with several TBytes of
   storage which needs to be backed-up and restored.
 - what sort of services the machines are running and how
   stable those services are
 - what is the frequency these machines change.  Do you deploy them
   and then they some data reduction process for the next 3 years, or
   are you releasing new software (or the latest security patch) every
   few weeks.
 - how close to the edge are you for performance.  Can you deploy
   they machines are just let them run, or do you need to monitor
   performance are constantly tweak system parameters to squeeze out
   every bit of performance you can.

It is possible to have ratios of over 1/200 if you have a lot of servers
which are identical to each other... but very few sites are like this.
Most sites at most 80% of their servers which are mostly identical, and
then have 20% of their machines which are more or less one-offs.
The one-off machines end up consuming a huge portion of the SAs time.

For example, I know a company which has approx 500 servers which
are more or less homogeneous... with each of these machines running
a couple specialize services and has little or no persistent data
stored of these machines.  Basically three people (one senior,
one intermediate, and one junior) SA were largely responsible
for the installation, configuration, and maint of these machines.  On
the other hand, the same org has around 50 machines which are running
more complex servers which have HA requirements, and/or oracle,
specialized perfs, large data stores, etc which has completely
consumed the time of two senior SAs (not to mention the DBAs, etc)
and still wants more attention.

My suggestion is to realize that getting staffing right is a long
term project.  Track what you get done with the resources you have.
Learn how to estimate new work.  Get people to "pay" for the
resources they consume, and if they can't pay, find a nice way to say
"Nope... can't do it without someone to carry this cost."

--Mark


> -----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 5:00 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?
>