Over the past year, Computer Economics has received a number of inquiries regarding typical staffing metrics for server support personnel. Although our annual IT Spending, Staffing, and Technology Trends study provides some useful statistics for benchmarking server support headcount, those metrics only report each job function as a percent of total IT staff. Because server support staff requirements are driven by factors other than the size of the IT staff, we determined that a specialized survey was needed to provide additional metrics.
The full report provides an analysis of server support staffing requirements for data centers running any combination of Windows, Unix, and Linux servers, based on a survey that we conducted in the second half of The survey solicited detailed information regarding the number of server support personnel in the respondents' organizations and how they spend their time, as well as data center characteristics such as the number and types of servers and operating systems, number of processors, extent of virtualization, and server growth rate.
Survey Demographics After purging incomplete or unqualified responses, there remained valid responses to the survey, representing data centers with as few as five servers to organizations with over 1, servers. Because the sample size is large enough, we are able to provide analysis by size of data center as defined by the number of servers in any combination of Windows, Unix, and Linux.
The study sample is therefore segmented as follows:. Server support personnel may be referred to by a number of different titles, including system programmer, system administrator, system engineer, computer operator, technical support, and others. Therefore, when counting server support personnel, we asked respondents to include all types of server operations, operational support, and technical support staff regardless of job title.
We explicitly asked respondents not to count application programmers or help desk staff. We also instructed respondents to include first-level supervisors who also directly perform server support activities. The second ratio is the number of machines and subsystems per staff, that is capturing how many people are needed to take care of the technical infrastructure. There are directory, security, messaging, and collaborative services.
To complicate matters, many sites are heterogeneous requiring extra efforts to make one service work for all clients, or worse, resulting in the need services which are based on the client platform. A final complicating factor is that these services often have complex interactions and dependencies which makes them more difficult to deploy and maintain. The itbenchmark blog has a number of postings on the topic of staff sizing. The number of administrators required varies greatly from site to site.
The one constant is that there are rarely enough system administrators for the responsibilities that they have. At the time this was originally written, I found it was possible for a single person to maintain up to machines with three different platforms and give adequate user services to a fairly sophisticated user population of around 80 people. You will note that this adds up to percent. In I posted a note to Usenet responding to a question about staffing ratios.
Over the years I have made some, mostly minor updates to the original article. One of these days I will rewrite it completely. While this article was written a long time ago, I find that the ratios are still pretty accurate.
If you think I am wrong, send me mail with your experiences. Awesome post! Do you do training? Not to mention vendor relationships with all the hardware and software companies. Your email address will not be published. Notify me of follow-up comments by email. Notify me of new posts by email. User Services e. Helpdesk How much hand-holding is expected? Software Support How much public domain software or freeware do people want installed? Cloud Services Support Increasingly today, organizations use cloud services to solve their business problems.
ERP System In our increasingly complex and regulated world, organizations have to track and manage a wide range of processes. Anticipate Technology Is the IT staff supposed to anticipate new technology and advise the company about new approaches? My Ratios The best way to estimate the number of administrators needed is to figure out what level of service is required and how various factors for instance networking infrastructure and heterogeneity of the machines being supported will affect the the fulfillment of those responsibilities.
Type of Work Units of labor to deliver best practice performance and scaling factors End User Service 1 unit to 50 users who get good service. Not needed if you are running the service with a seperate customer care organization. Ratio has to go up if you want help desk to run extended hours. Places that really care about this have a step in cost of 14 people… a manager, an assistant manager, three shifts, with each shift having two people, one shift running sunday-wednesday, and the other running wednesday-saturday so there is overlap between teams, clean handoffs, and times to do group training.
Less that this can easily result in shifts not being covered. The number of people needed per shift is related to how much normal work there is, and how many simultaneous disasters the team is expected to be able to handle. Operating System Management 2 units for each make of OS requiring basic support.
Doing very complex things requiring hacked kernels, non standard device drivers, etc then add 4 units. If you really care about security add an additional 12 units. Manage this like a software development project and get good engineers working on it.
Appliance Support 1 unit for each simple app. Initial deployment of apps is typically time consuming. Add 2 units if you want them to have better than Add 2 unit if you care about security. Add 1 unit if you are scaling larger than the average. Add 4 if you are scaling to mega size and are beyond what the software was designed for.
If you are completely beyond scale, treat a development project and staff accordingly with engineers. Complex Network Services Highly variable. Network Connectivity Scales against number of network devices, number of networks, security issues, complexity of routing, HA requirements. Coordination and Management The larger and more complex an organization, the more there is a need for coordination roles.
People who focus on human management, systems architecture, program management, project management. This is quite complex. It would be presumptuous to suggest a ratio.
Other Issues Site with one administrator are not very desirable. The more homogeneous a site is, the easier it is to support.
Larger sites can exploit economies of scale. What About Other Platforms? Conclusion The number of administrators required varies greatly from site to site. History of this Post In I posted a note to Usenet responding to a question about staffing ratios. Previous Great Meals. Good points all around. Efficiency by software automation helps a lot I've noticed. TanK This person is a verified professional. So something like this. Its pretty easy to estimate how many new employees they need each year after this.
This is how Id go about it anyway. Ticktock Jan 31, at UTC. It does depend on your environment and what your looking after. Time to manage a team I'm the manager and under my calculations should be full time technical meaning everytime I'm in a meeting we are offering a reduced service. Hope this helps Tony. Bryce Katz This person is a verified professional.
Ben Jan 31, at UTC. Education technology people would love those ratios. Most IT peeps in education cover plus machines. They can do this because they are usually the same configuration. I think users to 1 technician is a good rule of thumb for business. Mind you though for every 12 servers or so you will need a System administrator. Add wireless and remote sites and you will need a Network Administrator. Limey Jan 31, at UTC.
Ben wrote: Education technology people would love those ratios. Airteck This person is a verified professional. David Feb 1, at UTC.
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