Ratio of staff to servers

[Stefan Farrelly]

Hi all,

Im after some info on how many unix servers per unix administrator other companies employ. Please dont reveal any company information, just the ratio of unix servers you have to how many unix administrators you employ. Im trying to use this to justify increasing my team.

For example, we have 300 unix servers and have 6 unix administrators, for a ratio of 50:1 (servers:unix admin). The 3 other unix teams in my company all have ratios from 50:1 to 60:1

Thanks,

Stefan

[DCE]

I have worked for several companies. The ratios have been all over the board. The latest company is 15:1. the others were 20:1, 40:1, and 70:1.

As you could infer, the companies with the lower ratio's were more proactive with patches and problem management. The higher ratio companies were always in a fire fighting mode, and no time or resources to truely manage the systems. The also tended to have a higher turn over due to emplyee burn out.

[RAC_1]

350, 7 admins
50:1

[Stefan Farrelly]

Thanks guys, much appreciated.

Keep them coming!

[Paul F. Carlson]

315 Servers
8 Admins
~40:1

[Camel_1]

HP Server: 65
Unix Admin: 7

[Geoff Wild]

This depends - on the complexity of the environment.

We have 60 + servers...

10 AIX, 40 HP, 15 Sun, 2 Linux....

Emc DMX Frames...IBM Tape libraries...

From an application point of view: SAP, DNS, LDAP, UNix Control, ONS, OID, Oracle, Netbackup, OVO, Samba, Sendmail, Real Time Transaction Processing, Printing, Cleartrust, CICS, Control M, IDS, ServiceGuard, Ignite, NTP...

Some of those (Like SAP/Oracle) we don't admin directly - but assist the Basis and DBA teams and provide support...

9 Admins

Change is a constant...

Rgds...Geoff

[Jim Smith]

715 Unix servers
18 admins
~40:1

[Mark Greene_1]

I'll echo Geoff's comments about complexity.

We have 6 IBM boxes, 6 HP boxes, 7 RedHat boxes and about 5 more coming in the next 10 months, and 3 EMC systems: 1 SAN, 1 NAS, and 1 CAS. We will have DR counterparts for each of the EMC systems and for about half the IBM and HP boxes coming in the next 12 months.

And 2 Admins, but right now I'm the only EMC Admin we have.


mark

[Jeff_Traigle]

Currently about 40:8.

Been in the following situations:

70:2 (grossly understaffed for poorly designed HA environment and completely unrealistic management expectations)

600+:<=13 (grossly understaffed for rapidly growing environment.. those were just the underpaid "second-level" administrators in this ratio... don't recall how many "engineers" they had... had maybe 6 "first-level" administrators actually in the data center on a 24X7 schedule)

700ish:2 (not as bad as that ratio looks... wasn't 24X7, lots of help desk people with procedures to follow for the typical stuff that came up... very cookie-cutter server loads)

12:1 on my first two jobs

I think it's a lot more complex than just looking at a ratio to determine what your staff level should be. It really depends on how dynamic the environment is and how critical and complex the systems are and how highly available they are required to be and what your SLAs say your response time will be... not to mention what expected maintenance, monitoring, and analysis is expected.

[Stefan Farrelly]

Thanks all for the replies so far.

Yes, I agree, it depends on how complex the environment and if youre doing SAN and/or backups as well as unix admin. But for purposes of this I simply need a rough guideline as to the ratio of server:admins to see if we are in the right ballpark or not.

Either that or we have to subscribe to Gartner to get the info:-)

[A. Clay Stephenson]

I've worked in environments > 100:1 and as small as ~ 5:1. Currently, my enviroment is ~ 14:1 but we are expected to exceed 5 9's uptime.

[Rick Garland]

We are 18:1 right now. This includes an environment with HPUX 11.00, 11.11, and 11.23 on RISC and ia64 systems. Multiple RH Linux and SuSE on blades, several Solaris SPARCs running 2.6 thru 2.9

In the mix, Service Guard, Cluster Gateway, EVA arrays, etc.

Have been as low as 4:1 and as high as 34:1

[Sandman!]

700 servers / 15 SysAdmins
ratio of ~ 45:1

[Deoncia Grayson_1]

the ratio here is 66:1

[Patrick Wallek]

Currently we are 25:~1.25

I say that because I am currently really the only admin, but our Oracle DBA will be going to HP-UX classes soon so she can be my backup. So, eventually, it will be 25:2

[Zinky]

We've 40 servers (heterogeneous). Half are large servers. 3 UNIX Admins, 4 Storage (SAN and Backup Admins).

In a previous environment of 400 servers I worked for, we rolled out management tools from HP, IBM and CA and managed to trim Admins from 8 to just 3.

So I guess it all depends on the degree of automation and proceduralization of UNIX admin activities.

With the continued advancement of management tools and software and standardization plus more stable Unices, I think that ratio will continue to increase.

[Arunvijai_4]

Hi Stefan,

Welcome back after alomost 2 years in ITRC. Currently, we have around 200 unix servers (includes all major vendors and some mainframes too) and staffs are around 10 (20:1). In my previous org, we had around 20 HP-UX servers and 5 People (4:1)..

-Arun

[Senthil Kumar .A_1]

Hi Stefan,

In my org,
HPUX box : 160
Admins : 4 per shift. We have 2 shifts which span 12 hrs each.

effectively 8 admins, but concurrent 4 admins. so as per ur query the ratio is

40:1

Regards,
Senthil Kumar .A

[Gavin Clarke]

5 HPUX machines, 1 (HPUX)Admin.

Which looking at all the other replies makes me feel kinda small.

Cheers
Gavin

[Steve Lewis]

18 servers, 6 people.

However, we are all hybrid DBA/sysadmins and 90% of our time is spent on DBA work.

Given the rate of hardware failures, patch bundle installs and scheduled maintenance, I think in mixed server/package/DB environment, 30:1 machines per person should be the maximum.

If you manage many identical machines, this could be stretched to 50:1.

I think the real question is this: How many planned maintenance days per machine per man-year do you need?

An interesting subject.

I am not sure what effect consolidation/virtualisation really has on staffing.

[Pete Randall]

I'm with Gavin - 5 servers, one admin. Pretty puny, huh?


Pete

[Doug Burton]

Like the other folks above I've had a mixed bag. One place was >100:1 (HP-UX, AIX, Sun Windows, Building security and the phone system - Gasp - I got in some hours there) and as low as 8:1 (all HP-UX).

Basically, 10 boxes could be a nightmare till you get them up and running right. Afterwards you could be bored out of your mind. But 20 to 30 well running boxes per admin seems like a good number to me.

[Rita C Workman]

18 Servers: 1 Admin

...and also handles all the SAN Admin tasks for all types of storage for well over 70Tb raw.

Not a huge HPUX shop, but enough challenges.

Rgrds,
Rita

[Rita C Workman]

oops, forgot the 5430's..

21:1 ratio

Rita