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The Days of SysAdmin Numbered?
gmkeegan writes "The Economist is running a story about Sun's new N1 operating system whose purpose is to make today's system administrators redundant. The idea is to virtualize the computer system so that the automated resource management software can add, remove and manage everything dynamically. The article mentions similar efforts by IBM, HP, and Microsoft."
This seems to be nothing more than glorified load balancing.
I was at the (nicely done) Sun Network show last week in SF, and I went to the N1 announcment. What a snooze-fest. They start off claiming that they will virtualize the OS. In the future, if you need more compute resources, you'll just throw another box into the rack, no OS configuration, not even an IP address.
Of course, they'r enot quite there yet. They've been at it for close to two years now, and it seems that all they have is some IT management solution. Yawn. Not only that, the plan goes three years out before they reached the vision mentioned above. And even then it's Sun hardware only.
Business 2.0 quoted someone as saying that if Sun doesn't make N1 work, they will simply fade away. Well, maybe they'll make it work, but will anyone care. I'm not sure Sun has three years left. With Intel eating at its HW revenue and Linux slurping up the software revenue, and no services arm to speak of. Man, I don't see Sun's future. It's not N1, anyway.
That's only when the work isn't being shipped offshore to be coded. And that happens more all the time. Programmers in India come quite inexpensively, and there's no reason to import them into the US to make use of them.
Scott McNeally long ago openly stated that it's his aim to put lots of IT workers out of a job. He thinks IT takes up too many resources in terms of staff and manpower. Sun has long stated a goal of making systems that run with a minimum of personnel. This is attractive to budget minded CFO's that see a golden opportunity to save money (and take home a nice bonus) for bringing the axe down on IT personnel. However, I agree with the other posts in here. No matter how much self-administration and redundancy you build into a system, you're always going to need more staff than you think.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
I doubt it will work.
I wouldn't be too sure about that. Before I bacame a Unix admin, I worked with mainframes. A lot of the various jobs that I had as an operator, a scheduler and DASD manager, have all been automated out of existence. I kept my job on the strength of learning how to admin the various automation packages. Everyone said that would never work either. All the same, I saw the operations staff reduced from 20 people per shift to 4 in the space of about 18 months.
This feels like deja vu. I had a feeling this would happen sooner or later.
Liberty in Our Lifetime
I think the confusion here is caused by the ambiguous definition of "sysadmin". I believe the sysadmin that Sun is shooting for is more the "set up and keep the big hardware running" type of sysadmin. Not the captain helpdesk guy who sets up pc's and fields stupid questions. If you're setting up desktops and workstations, I'd say your a help desk support person, not a sysadmin.
They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty nor security
Um, I don't mean to be blunt (well, actually I do), but what planet are you on?
I have 14 years experience, (7 UNIX C/C++, 4 Perl, SQL, and a bunch of other languages along with a Sun Java 2 Programmer cert), a B.S.E.E. and a M.S.C.S. from Wash. U. in St. Louis, and I spent 8 months job hunting after my company shut down their facility here. I finally did get a job, but I had to take a 20% pay cut, and the benefits are almost non-existent.
You say they would MUCH rather hire qualified American workers. But they get to define what qualified means. Their meaning of qualified is that you have to have 3 (or more) years of job experience using the exact tools and programming environment that they are using. Pity the worker who spent their work time doing their job instead of looking for the latest technologies so they could pad their resume. And of course, if those 3 years of experience are your only 3 years, so much the better, because then they can lowball the salary. And then if you are an H1-B indentured servant, they can lowball it even more.
It's very simple. Companies don't want to train people, because the less you know, the less mobile you are. And a resume with 17 different skills on it is meaningless of you don't have the exact 5 they are looking for.
I'll believe there's a shortage of qualified workers when I start getting calls from employment agencies again.
Hopelessly pedantic since 1963.
Next time, save yourself 18 minutes and go look up the beep-codes on the MB mfg's website ;)
- > Who manages the management system?
Sun recently presented us (team of unix admins) with thier sales pitch and five year stategy for this stuff.The management?
When we asked how N1 was managed, they told us about thier management console - a friendly gui where everything can be conviently dragged and dropped to build new systems/reassign resources/fire sysadms. It is designed to be managed by management.
Some figures were given on some of the slides, including a before/after N1 comparision of staff requirements/system benifits. The before slide indicated that a single admin can manage ~20-50 systems, while under N1 a single admin will be managing upwards of 500 systems.
"because I had an account on a Sun e10k and I can tell you like clockwork the thing reset every month for a year and then Sun came out and said 'yes, every Sun e10k on the market does this it's bad cache in some form but we don't understand and we suggest installing more a/c. in addition we made all our customers who reported the problem sign an NDA to get support. any questions?'"
Heh, I knew someone would pop up with that. The problem with that is I know the common BIOS beep codes (at least for award) and it didn't sound like any of them. If it's not Video, Memory or CPU if you are able to find a description of the beep code it will most likely be something like "Failed to initialize FD21h at 0xF010". Just for kicks, I checked BIOS Central for the code and the closest match I could find indicates a memory error and suggests reseating or replacing the memory. I fail to see how that would help me diagnose a failed power supply. Also, keep in mind that 10 of the 20 minutes was finding a new power supply and installing it. I would have to do that anyway.
Enigma