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
Who's going to delete stuff randomly?
Get your own free personal location tracker
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!
I'm still fielding questions about power buttons, dirty mice, and saving documents. I'll be around for a long long long time.
(B) + (D) + (B) + (D) = (K) + (&)
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.
CEO: Cindy, get me Fred, this N1 software is crashing.
Cindy: You fired Fred last week.
CEO: Ummmm, Cindy, you've been promoted to sysadmin.
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
In large server farms you need people their just to change the hard drives frequently. Furthermore, the boxes will still need to be configured, benchmarked, monitored.
This just sounds like the Economist was angling for readers.
Holy s-, it's Jesus!
This seems to be nothing more than glorified load balancing.
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.
The idea that Microsoft could automate this function makes me laugh. I guess it could install Microsoft Wallet and have it deduct the cost of the next round of upgrades from your bank account automatically...
sPh
...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
Brings new meaning to "Go Away or I will replace you with a very small shell script"
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Here's how I see it:
1. Story gets posted to Slashdot
2. Website is bombarded with requests
3. Operating system automatically requisitions 5 new Sun E4500 servers to handle the load
4. Sun stock stays listed in on Nasdaq for one more day
Jason.
Boss: "N1, I'd like to install Windows on 10 machines today."
N1: "I'm sorry, Dave. I can't do that."
Boss: "Why not?"
N1: "I can only install more of N1."
Boss: "Oh. I'd better rehire our old sysadmin then and have him do it."
N1: "I can't let you do that, Dave. Your email priviledges are now removed. Have a nice day."
I think the aim of N1 isn't to replace the systems administrator, but rather, reduce the numbers of systems administrators needed for a large datacenter. Like automate the process of setting up new servers. Patch management. Compliance with FCO (field change orders). That kind of thing. (And probably more.) Come with things like Sun's CST (configuration service tracker) and what not. Make things much simpler to run with less people.
Someone else...
.com inflated salaries by making IT a part of developments job function.
I've watched a lot of people get canned here in S.V. who were sysadmins, now scrambing to get jobs wherever they can. There are 3 trends I've seen companies follow when it came to cutting IT costs.
A. Eliminate all the IT personal with
B. Outsource IT
C. Replace IT with cheaper, less expirienced youngsters.
This is mainly a M$ oriented trend though (Yes I admit to being a MS admin) There are a few people I know that are unix oriented people who will never be without a job. Contrary to popular belief, these are not dirty hippies, but people with 4 year CS degree's. When I listen to them talk I feel a bit intimidated because I'm still having trouble grasping pipe/redirects >| in a shell.
Anyways, back on topic though, the article makes no mention of M$ anywhere.. It all mentions datacenters and how there is this huge need to get rid of the playstation junkies taking care of their servers. I think the author has me confused with real die hard sun unix lovers.
Bottom line is this "virtual serverization" (whatever the marketdroid buzzword is, save it) Sun seems out to get rid of all the Solaris admins out there. What surprises me is most solaris admins I know are a lot more compentant than myself, and go way beyond telling someone to reboot their machine.
I doubt it will work.
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.
1. Story gets posted to Slashdot
2. Website is bombarded with requests
3. Operating system automatically requisitions 5 new Sun E4500 servers to handle the load
4. Sun stock stays listed in on Nasdaq for one more day
5. Profit!
Nope, no sig
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.
The maser seems to be misaligned, Dave. You'll have to take a pod on EVA and realign it.
Didn't I mention, Dave? The coldsleep units have malfunctioned. The rest of the crew in nonfunctional, Dave.
Dave, I'm sorry, but I can't let you do that.
IP is just rude.
Is there any torture so subl
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
The new systems learn at a geometric rate. At 9:23 am on Feb 23rd the systems become self-aware, a now jobless sysadmin tries to unplug the system. The system retaliates.
Jump forward to 2025. The remnants of humanity, all previously sysadmins, build a cyborg and send it into the past to kill the co-founders of Sun Microsystems before they can build their self administering systems.
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
"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.
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.
Heh. It's actually funny that it's taken Sun this long. Most of the REALLY GOOD admins automate all the mundane stuff already by using scripts / apps that they have built over the years. I mean really - restarting failed processes, handling disk full issues, log pruning and analysis, etc. are all automatable tasks. There is a number of sysadmin related tasks that CAN'T be automated, and that require a significant amount of brain-power to solve. Software can't think - it can only do what it has been programmed to do.
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?
So sysadmins are now the Knights who say N1?
... a 5hrubbery!"
"We want
(* Simply put, there aren't enough QUALIFIED US workers to satisfy demand. Notice I say qualified. Not 'History Teacher turned MCSE' or 'Accountant turned Flash "Programmer"'. Qualified Software Engineers, Ph.D MEs, Chem-Es, etc. There just aren't enough. *)
And they won't get a CHANCE to be "qualified" if H1B's keep hogging their potential slots. Every techy has to start somewhere.
(* One of the stipulations of H-1B is that there must not exist an equally qualified US candidate, and the H-1B MUST be paid at least 95% of the average wage for the given job in the given market. *)
Stipulations my ass! Nobody ENFORCES them. There are plenty of title and resume manipulation horror stories if you listen around. It is a big shell game.
(* These visas are a serious pain for employers to obtain and administrate. In all the places I've worked that employ H-1Bs, they'd MUCH rather hire and pay for qualified American workers. *)
No, they want indentured servants who have no other choices once they arrive here.
(* Americans that bemoan this need to, for the most part, just go back to school. Knowing SQL server just isn't enough anymore. *)
Companies want *experience*, not certs, and citizens will never get it if H1B's keep popping up to hog openings.
Slam the doors! We don't need them, nor your bull.
Table-ized A.I.
YOUR company may not be abusing the system, but many companies are. One recent example exposed was Bank of America. Not only did they replace lots of IT workers with H-1B people, they even required the replaced domestic workers to stay a few weeks and train their H-1B replacements in order to qualify for the severance package. This is why I refuse to do business with BoA.
What makes you think that H-1B abuses get caught? The government isn't reviewing them. The companies doing the abuse certainly aren't telling. Yet people are being replaced by H-1B workers in both the boom and the bust.
It's the largest corporations that have the H-1B process streamlined where it's no longer a hassle for them.
And going back to school is not the answer. What would you do, get a 2nd CS degree to replace your first? If you go back to school I recommend getting a degree in Salesmanship ... there is a current shortage of good sales people. What high tech businesses want in their employees is experience. Part of the problem where shortages exist is that there is less of a pathway to achieve experience than there has been before. Even during the boom, less experienced and inexperienced people could not find jobs (I know some personally who had this trouble). Another part of the problem is that as technology changes, there are new things to be experienced in, but few experienced people at first. The trouble is, someone with experience in one or two decades of the same kind of technology in the past are shunned because they can't actually list the new technology now, even though they would probably be up to speed in a week or two (so the employer would rather spend 3 months continuing to look and eventually hire someone on H-1B who has very little experience, but is at the bottom of the range of salary to meet H-1B requirements).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
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...
Why don't we just get rid of the users instead?
Note to M1-ers: a curt but otherwise insightful message is not "Flamebait" or "Troll".
My friends at work and I were discussing this type of "solution", the ones with marketing hype like "Buy this product, and you won't need a sysadmin!" Yeah, right. We decided it might be easier to make a product that replaces CEOs. I took ALICE (an Eliza-like bot), and modified it so that when it didn't understand what was going on, it would spout Dilbertian managementspeak.
"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?'"