Slashdot Mirror
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."
Who manages the management system?
Vlad
The Raven
For this to work, there needs to be a very big advance in the area of AI. Otherwise, if anything breaks in a way not forseen by the designers, there would need to be a sysadmin to fix it.
This is more a marketing ploy than anything else.
this implies that there is management who can handle running this, or want to. most Managers don't know networking from a hole in the ground. Somebody's gotta set up the desktops and workstations, and keep them running...even if the software can handle it, hardware needs troubleshooting every now and then too
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
And just who do they think is gonna make sure the machines are doing their job properly?
gone? Nah. Changing? Yeah, everyday.
Sent from your iPad.
All the CEOs and VPs with their MBAs are going to see these new systems and immediately replace the existing technology and start firing SysAdmins... then (I'm going to guess here) 41 days later they'll all be sitting in their offices asking out loud "what's wrong with the e-mail?" or "why can't I log in?"
Then they'll call up the old SysAdmins and offer to hire them back at hopefully double the salary.
You never really know how much you need something until it's gone.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing -- Emo Phillips
Automating some of the work that a Sysadmin has to do won't make them redundant. Theres always something else to do. And anyone trusting the system to work correctly on its own with no human overseeing it is just asking for trouble.
...computer management of cars has obsoleted all auto mechanics. ...food processors put every chef out of a job. ...handwriting recognition eliminated postal workers. ..."eliza" makes George Bush irrelevant.
Hmm. On second thought...
-b
Before Chicken Little comes and shouts that the sky is falling, I would dare say that this is just an extension of a trend that's been there.
As even simply part of a sales strategy, companies have been working on making things easier. Yes, sometimes this results in inadequate software, but in the market in general this makes it far easier to get companies to upgrade, update, and use new software. I don't know if the performance benefits are really great, but I know that companies have been working to cut down redundancies.
Does this mean that there won't be system administrators anymore? No. But I would say that system administrators are resources used up in ways secretaries used to. I remember when everybody wrote things by hand and gave them to secretaries to type up in offices. Now because people have better typing skills and typing is more important to even access information, there are fewer secretaries. Many secretaries are now far more multi-functional, handling numerous tasks in an office. The same will happen with system adminstrators.
Gone will be the days of hiding back in the server room with arcane tasks. There will be more work handling information patterns and purchasing and securing things, and less in the day-to-day routine kill of processes, recovering files for idiot users, and so on.
Personally, I hope the same will happen for programmers, so we stop calling simple coders programmers and go back to real work in programming.
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it. - G.B. Shaw
I think the aim of N1 isn't to replace the systems administrator, but rather, reduce the numbers of systems administrators needed for a large datacenter. Like automate the process of setting up new servers. Patch management. Compliance with FCO (field change orders). That kind of thing. (And probably more.) Come with things like Sun's CST (configuration service tracker) and what not. Make things much simpler to run with less people.
Given the number of unpatched hole-ridden mis-configured servers out there this would eliminate the most unreliable component. Average real-world sysadmin != Slashdot idealized sysadmin.
Sure, this will make system administrators obsolete, just as we don't need programmers any more now that we have compilers and RAD tools.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
They're not out to eliminate the sysadmin, they're just trying to "do it right", to do the things that many intelligent sysadmins do already. It will eliminate some sysadmin jobs, where departments had too many people because their processes were inefficient, but the good sysadmins will still have jobs.
I've seen some companies running a unix datacenter with 100 machines and 30 unix admins, which is just crazy. Other places, I've seen 1000 machines run by 5 guys, which is how it should be. The guys at the smart places write good management scripts, and know how to scale their management of the systems well. Sun is just trying to encapsulate these things so that even the companies too dumb to do it on their own can now have such benefits.
11*43+456^2
That's helpdesk work, not system administration. If your job consists mostly of that, then I'm sorry to break it to you, but you're not a sysadmin.
Hunh? You sure about that?
You'd likely be correct if you're speaking of a big company, but your blanket statemnet is way off base. Smaller shops usually have an IT person or two, who do everything from architect systems to answer any and all tech support/help desk calls. If the servers, WAN, LAN and Internet pipe are all humming along - IOW, he's done the job of sysadmin well - the only thing left to screw up his day would be the users. ("Nawww!" sighs the audience, sarcasticly) Since small shops don't make a habit of getting new stuff in on a regular basis, there's not much else to do but tech support. To boot, once a company exec (owner, partner, CEO, whatever) knows you're good at fixing his screw ups, no matter the size of the company, they'll call you, no matter your job title. I've been there, and I know how he feels.
I'd ditch the elistist attitude, bud - anyone who keeps a companies IT infrastructure running is a Sysadmin. If you think about it, diversifying your knowledge, as well as you expectations, are the best way to keep yourself employed when there's people who are writing systems that want to make your job redundant.
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
"But the biggest challenge, says Yousef Khalidi, chief technology officer for N1, was in packaging the technology. It will only be adopted if the nerds who run corporate systems co-operate, which they might not do if it creates too rapid change or even loses them their job."
...or maybe it was the fact your goal is to replace me instead of work with me to fix the problems you have with your EXISTING products?
Er...come again? What part about your product is supposed to make me want to install it? The fact you called me a nerd, or the fact that so far all you have is marketing hype and no real product?
I'm not going anywhere for a while, but you may be looking for a new job in the near future. What was your username?
G
This space intentionally left blank.
Any technical person worth their salt will be able to find productive work for the forseeable future. Sure you might have to make adjustments and it might take some time in the middle of a downturn, but you have nothing to complain about when compared to the average blue-collar worker whose company downsized, closed a plant or shut down completely.
That said, I'm still not that happy about the way certain industries can import labor instead of treating the people who are here better. At least most illegal immigrants are doing jobs that few citizens will take, and I think their status should be normalized to prevent abuse. Also, as long as I am this far off topic, there needs to be some normalization of labor conditions worldwide. Trade normalization is fundamentally unfair without it.
I know a few so-called-nerds who could kick this so-called-journalist's arse. It's a troll, people; but it's also a troll that has the ear of management wonks who may listen. If you're a small department without an IT manager, it would serve you well to work on educating the decision makers as to what your job entails, your job responsibilities as defined by management and also good system administrator practices, and how you're overworked as it is. Frame it so they don't think that this system (if it works) will save them expensive wages, but it will improve their IT department's customer service and add value to the organization by giving them more time to research and impliment new technologies.
Anyone smell vapor? If it can automatically reconfigure machines for demand, what happens when the demand switches throughout the day (IE email in the morning, pr0n filtering at lunch, and facilities management systems just before punchout)? How long does it take to reconfigure a machine? What if you get a DOS attack aimed to entice this management software to start reconfiguring a bunch of machines? What if it's a DOS attack from inside the firewall?
The system is supposed to save "days" of machine-configuration time, but how often do you configure new servers? If you were deploying a commodity system (could custom systems be automated?), wouldn't you use a system image or other running system as a base?
A number of years ago (in the 1995 timeframe), I was told by my boss that 1 admin per 30 Windows machines was about normal, and 1 admin per 100 Unix machines was roughly equivalent. My later experience roughly bears that out. With NT 4.0 networks, you need a second person fairly early. At about 20 machines, assuming you're growing quickly, you'll want help. You'll want to add another person at about 50, and you should be good with three up to 100 clients or so.
:-) )
Windows 2000 has added many automated tasks in Active Directory, but when I last worked with it (without service packs), those things tended to be a bit flaky at times. I suspect you probably need the same three guys at 50 machines, but you can probably scale them to 150-200. This is purely theoretical, and is based on a six-month contract learning and setting up a brand-new Windows 2000 network, back pre-SP1. I'd be interested to hear from any experienced 2K admins whether or not my wild-assed guess is accurate.
I'm now the sole admin in a network of about a hundred Linux machines. I'm busy as hell, but I can keep up with things. Scripting is lifesaving. With a well-set-up cluster, you can script almost anything, and can scale from 2 to 2000 machines in much less than linear time. (ie, 2000 machines is probably 20 times as hard as 2, not 1000 times.) I could definitely use help, but I bet that two of us could scale to at least 400 boxes.
As other people are pointing out, what Sun's solution is going to do is replace all the low-end stuff, all the routine things that the beginners do. That's going to make it really hard to break into the sysadmin market... either you already know it all and can run the whole network, or you don't really know anything and can't get hired. It's a nasty catch-22.... you'll need experience with large networks to get experience with large networks. It'll suck to be coming out of college into that kind of environment.
In general, I tend to think that you're not really doing your job well, as a sysadmin, unless you're putting yourself out of a job every day. A really well-run network should run great whether or not you happen to show up that day -- or that week, or that month. That's sort of an abstract Holy Grail... real networks don't work like that, but it's a good goal. The closer you approximate it, the better you're doing. If you drop dead tomorrow and the company isn't terribly injured, you were doing a good job. (or you weren't doing anything
I suspect that nearly all tech jobs are temporary.... eventually the tech will change and render most jobs obsolete. This is true of technology in general, but it's happening a lot faster in computers than in other, older technologies, like autos or televisions. Obsolescence happens quickly, well within individual techy lifetimes.
Remember, computers are very new, compared with most human technologies, and everything is still jury-rigged and labor-intensive. Gradually that's going to go away, and there will be a need for fewer and fewer people doing the jobs we do today. But... as these lower layers get sorted out and finalized into best practices and insta-networks (just add a drop of water) a whole new class of jobs will arise, USING those networks to accomplish things. And I suspect that those jobs will be tremendously more interesting than the ones we have now.
Just like we need far, far fewer man-hours to make a ton of steel than we did in 1900, we'll need far fewer creators-of-networks. That's the nature of capitalism: creative destruction. Overall it's very good, but it's hard on the people in the middle of it.
Seems like there's a lot of hype and misunderstanding about what this is all about. The journalist writing the article didn't help any, as he didn't seem to understand what this is about either. I work for a company that writes this sort of software, so I should know something about this...
Firstly, this is not really designed for desktop machines, as I understand. The main focus is servers. You link a whole bunch of servers together, set some sort of global policy rules (eg the web server can have as much CPU on as many machines as it wants), and its up to this smart software to intelligently enforce the policy.
Secondly, presuming the software has a fairly substantial cost per seat, who's going to use it on a set of workstations where you can't even predict whether they're going to be turned on or not. Unless you're running really CPU intensive stuff that can be parallelised really well, then what's the point?
Thirdly, I don't think many sysadmins are going to find themselves out of work due to this. There's going to need to be intelligent thought put into setting up this "global policy" stuff in the first place, and both admin and business will need to cooperate to work it out...