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| Tech Update
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By Brian Richardson
February 11, 2002
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Along with tighter IT budgets during 2001, reduction of infrastructure costs has generally eclipsed the importance of "time to implementation" and the rapid concomitant infrastructure build-out. Moreover, we estimate that high-end Unix system sales are down about 30 percent. With fewer "big ticket" purchases looming, and the requirement for more exacting return-on-investment analyses, many IT organizations are appropriately focusing on infrastructure total cost of ownership (TCO). Our research indicates that TCO is dominated by infrastructure ongoing or recurring costs, which constitute about 70 percent of expenses (over a five-year period). Naturally, IT staff costs are a major recurring expense (along with maintenance, support, licensing, and operations costs). We do not expect mature partitioning and workload management tools to enable application and database server consolidation until after 2003 for Unix, and after 2005 for Windows 2000.
A significant TCO component is the ratio of servers to system administrators (sys admins). Our research indicates that industrywide server-to-sys admin ratios span a disturbingly wide range of about 3:1 to 30:1. Given this broad range, determining the vertical best-practice ratios (such as financial services, retail, and manufacturing) will offer little insight into specific situations, because more detailed comparisons are needed. We recommend that IT organizations instead track the system-to-sys admin ratio for their own shops, over time. The goal is to steadily increase the ratio to about 30:1. Following are our responses to some of the main questions that arise on this topic.
Q: Why is there such a large range of server-to-sys admin ratios?
A: We believe the variability in server-to-sys admin ratios is a result of various IT organizations defining the roles and responsibilities of systems administrators differently. In some organizations, sys admins primarily perform operations functions (such as booting up systems and performing backups). In other shops, they may also provide some level of network monitoring, end-user support, performance monitoring, or even some database administration (in rare cases).
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