get points and answer one question

[David Totsch]

Thomas:

WARNING: HP employee answering (and one that provides the services about to be discussed).

You did not mention a very important aspect of the configuration: the support contract. What you have described is a fairly complex, Highly Available environment; to cover all of skills you mention, everyone is right, you will need at least two people. Then we can start talking coverage in a 24x7x365 shop -- someone mentioned time away from the office -- don't forget training and Interworks/HPWorld. A significant number of the high-octane admins that participate in this forum "don't need no stinkin' help", but your hardware and specially software support contract can help you determine the level of expertise you need (still very high, but a high-level support contract can apply services to your contract to help fill-in gaps -- finding a person or two highly skilled in all of the areas you mention could be difficult).

And, just a personal opinion, you are a bit short on equipment. With the environment described, I am hoping you neglected to describe the devlopment/test envirnment your personnel will have in addition to production. If you don't have it already, you will probably upgrade to RPs and add nPAR or vPAR technology to your list of required skills.

-dlt-

[John Dvorchak]

Look at the problem this way. You have Service Guard, you have mirrored disks, you are making backups and probably have a UPS. Why would you then only have one person? This application is obviously important to your business model, so why jepordize the application by having only one person support it. Talk about a HUGE single point of failure.

You have to have a minimum of two people, one Sysadmin and one DBA and that would assume that you have an operations staff to switch tapes, call for harware support etc off hours and on weekends/holidays.

[Jack Werner]

Hi, I'm a latecomer, but I'm our Oracle DBA and I am a green HP/UX Admin. To me its imperative that a DBA have at least script programming skills to administer Oracle on a Unix Server. The more esoteric Sys Admin skills should probably be left to a Sr HP/UX Admin. In our shop I rely on a skilled Oracle PL/SQL developer to back me up when I'm off plant. I can also depend on our former DBA who has transferred to development. I let our Senior HP/UX Admin handle the EMC configurations and the HP/UX installations and Patch resolutions. I have enough to administer 15 Oracle 7 Dbs on 3 HP/UX 10.20 servers plus 30 Oracle 8i Dbs on 6 HP/UX 11.1 Servers. We are planning on installing Oracle 9.2, but have some issues with the requisite Patches. I think you will need 4 people; 2 DBAs and 2 senior Sys Admins

[Tim D Fulford]

The above is quite a shopping list. Some other things to ponder.
o Will the system need to be supported 24x7
o Will the system grow/get updates (HP-UX 10.20 is V old now)
o Will you accept people who are experienced in Oracle & not so in HP-UX & visa versa.
o Is it alright if this person is off sick!

The day-to-day of the above seems OK with one person. But when it comes to doing out of hours upgrades & support the task may well be too onerous.

I know nothing of your system (other than the above), but you will need to replace the K classes soon which will mean an upgrade to HP-UX 11.X at least.

I think you will need 2-3 people especially if there is going to an on-call rota. You will also need a testbed if they are to "competantly" re-design & test new database designs etc.

That was my 0.02??? worth

Tim

[Joanne Keegan]

I'd recommend two. It all depends on the skill sets of the individuals, plus it is important to have a person to back the other one up.

Regards,

Jo

[Frederic Zeller]

Hi

As a general rule : What happens if that person is on vacation ? or sick ? or away for a long time for any reason ?

For any "critical" task, you always need (at least) one backup.


But the backup has to be involved with all tasks ...

Because just stating that a person is someone else's backup is not enough ...

The best is always having a "team" for each task

Fred

[George Petrides_1]

Ideally, you need two people one UNIX administrator and one Database Administrator (DBA). It also seems like a complex environment due to clustering therefore a Jr. UNIX admin will have a hard time managing this. Usually it is not feasible to employ full time two highly paid highly skilled technical people for only two servers unless this is a critical system with multimillion $ downtime cost/hr. Since I had a customer with a similar situation, the solution there was to hire one person with knowledge of UNIX and Oracle who was backed up by two external consultants with a support contract for responding on emergencies and some monthly cleanup and the rest on a Time and Material basis. The two consultants were a top UNIX admin and a top DBA who charged premium $ and the full time employee was coordinating the work, planned for upgrades, dealt with the users and performed daily routine tasks. It worked very good for my customer until the full time person left and they hired an incompetent idiot who blew up the deal by making the consultants life miserable and playing politics with the rest of the company. The above works but you have to have the right people and top consultants who will be able to have a long term relationship and not try and 'milk' the customer. The consultants were paid $175/hr for regular work and $220/hr for emergency work.
If you try and have one person to handle your shop, then be prepared to pay $200k/yr in the US in order to get a very good UNIX Admin with very good DBA skills else prepare for downtime and problems...

[BKUMAR]

Hi

You need 2 people for better structured environment.....during the peak schedule like a downtime for upgrades/patch installs person should be able to plan his schedule and the person should not be loaded with other reqmts during that time....so one person could plan his schedule and other normal d-t-d jobs.....

better plan for 2 people with both unix/oracle skills involved.....

All the best for recruiting !