System Administration Cost Studies?

davodavodavo asks: "I'm a market researacher looking for any industry data on the costs of administering UNIX, Linux and Wintel server farms. I've got the overview stuff (Gartner grp), but I'm looking to build a fairly detailed cost model. Specific focus are the activities of server configuration management -- binary images, software distribution, and application deployment. How frequently does some part of a server's software stack have to be updated / upgraded? Any data along the following lines will be appreciated: amount of time it takes an admin to update 50 machine; frequency of distribution or configuration error requiring a roll-back to a previous configuration; average time to perform a rollback; and so forth. If anyone knows of a good detailed model on this topic, please send pointers! I will happily provide the results of my work to the slashdot community (if you are interested, please email me). Basically, I am simply trying to understand the economics behind server management."

Comments

Term Paper or Dot Bomb Business Plan

[Anonymous Coward]

Which one are you developing with this question?

I'd recommend that you get a job as a sys admin. Once you've done it for a while, you'll know what all seasoned sys admins know.

It takes x long to do y job in z environment. x and y will be different with every variant of z.

Education Costs

[Lando]

Don't forget about education costs... Figure that a sysadmin to stay current with technology needs about 4 weeks of training each year... At ~2500 a week that's about 10K right off the top.

Not sure what level of system administration you are looking for. Enterprise system administration is different from a medium or small size company.

It's would probably be better to try to find some complete IT budgets and see what they spend on systems administration. Also look at the metrics for each system type.