How many people would you employ for sysadmin / dba ?

[Martin Johnson]

The answer to your question is: It depends.

If your applications are stable (i.e. change very little) and there is not a lot of data growth, you could get away with 2 crosstrained SA/DBA people.

If, on the other hand, the environment is very dynamic and unstable, you may need a half dozen people for support.

Some key questions:

How often is after hour support needed?

Several calls a night, every night, will quickly burn out a person. In this case, you will need an oncall list with three or more people. If you are getting multiple calls for both OS and DB support, then both oncall list will need 3+ people each.

What level are your support contracts with your vendors (HP, Oracle, etc)?

If they are of a high level, then your people will not need a high level of expertise. They would just call for support and let the vendor do the rest. Unfortunately, without a high level (expensive) contract, it could take days to resolve an issue. In this case, you want highly trained experts on your staff that can fix problems quickly without having to reply on the vendor. Not all your employees have to be experts. You can set up an internal escalation procedure. NOTE: Your experts probably should not be on the oncall list as they can be conceivably be called every night, whether they are oncall or not. Again, this means an increase in the number of employees as now their jobs are defined by their level of support.

HTH
Marty

[Brian Crabtree]

We have 310 servers, with 593 databases, and 8 DBA's.

Brian

[Wouter Jagers]

The 1+1 deal would be quite ok if you plan to keep your infrastructure exactly like it is now for quite some time, and availability is not highly critical.

If you expect many change-requests for the environment, or new systems to be added regularly, get a 2+2 combo. Also go 2+2 (at least) when you want extreme availability, in order to prevent ulcers, heart-attacks and caffeine/amphetamine addictions ;-)

Seems to be budgeting time everywhere :-)

regards
Wout

[Caesar_3]

Hello!

I think 3 will be good, but they should be
know System & DBA or one good system other good
DBA and the third will know from both.
In this case they can replace each other
when it needed and also there is always a phone that could be used.

Caesar

[John Bolene]

without killing folks in a 24 hour shop, you need to have most shifts covered

this will mean 2 each of DBA and admin

if they are lightly cross-trained they can take the oncall for each other

[Tom Geudens]

Hi Alexander,
I'm missing something in your list ... the number of people these sysadmin's / dba's have to give support too !

How many developers depend on the DBA to "help" them with procedural SQL ? Do these guys/gals cover the security for developers/endusers as well ?

In an environment where covering these servers is everything they have to do, 1 sysadmin and 1 DBA (both having the knowledge to be each others backup) will do. However, if 200 developers work on these systems I'd bump up the DBA's to 5 (1 for 40 developers) and the sysadmins to 2 (1 for 100 developers).

Regards,
Tom Geudens

[Mark Greene_1]

As has been stated, if you are a 24x7 shop, you need 2 SAs and 2 DBAs.

We have 14, and soon to be 16 servers (7 HP, 6 IBM, 2 RedHat, 1 Data General still hanging in there), plus an EMC Clariion SAN. We are a 24x7 shop, and at least 8 of those systems plus the SAN are running what management considers vital applications for the business that have to be up and running 99%+ of the time, and another 4 of those just under that in importance. We may be (finally) going to an enterprise backup solution.

We are adding a 3rd SA this month, in part to deal with the system load and so I can personally concentrate more on the SAN, and to extend our on-call rotation by one more week so we don't get burned-out.

We have 2 DBAs, but they are only getting into doing Oracle support recently. We used to contract with the software vendors for that, and still do for some applications. Our DBAs mostly support MS SQL databases. I don't know how many we have, but it's not really equivalent to your situation.

mark

[Geoff Wild]

With it being 24 x 7, I would agree with most of the others here.

2 SA's (1 senior, 1 junior) and 2 DBA's (1 senior, 1 junior).

Rgds...Geoff

BTW - at my site, we have 57 databases - 28 are 24 x7, and 28 HP-UX, 10 AIX, 6 Solaris servers. We have 5 DBA's and 8 SA's.

[Rainer von Bongartz]

Alexander,

I think you'll need two people which are good unix and dba administrator and a third one who can manage the 'usual things'

This will give more security and flexibility plus the chance to evolve the IT,and keep up with the news.

Regards
Rainer

Btw. the beer is not forgotten !!!!!

[Alexander M. Ermes]

Hi.
Just some answers.
Tom, we have a team of approx. 15 developers working on the different system.
V-class estimated 350 users
N-cluster estimeated 300 users
K460 estimated 350 users

Setup on all systems nearly same standard.
Rgds
Alexander M. Ermes