How Many Admins Per User/Computer Have You Seen?

miffo.swe writes "I'm trying to find the normal ratio of technicians/support tech per user or computer in your average IT-shop. When searching around, I can't find that many examples or any statistics. We manage around 900 computers (mostly Windows XP) and 25+ servers (mostly Linux). There are around 2600 users of varying knowledge, mostly pretty low. I can't find any statistics on this, so real-world examples are very welcome since we do this with one sysadmin (me) and two sneaker techs. Are we seriously understaffed, or is this normal?"

Comments

Depends

[slimjim8094]

The real question is are you always constantly working your ass off, fixing stupid problems - and therefore unable to do anything more productive? If so, then it seems you don't have enough people.

If you have a fully managed office, and you can remote in to all these desktops and fix everything really quickly - then you're probably OK.

Like most of IT, whatever works.

Re:Depends

[sammy baby]

IT Administrators are there to do what they are told. Admins who think they can 'demand justifications' are just jumped up losers who are envious of people doing real work that they are simply not smart enough to do.

Sorry, but this is utter bullshit. I speak as an engineer in a development department who frequently needs to work with IT administration.

Keeping the shop running is a cost of doing business. But that doesn't mean it isn't appropriate to try to do some kind of cost containment or planning on it. Believe me, I've seen enough bonehead mistakes to know that if our development group ran our IT infrastructure, it would be a total shambles. (Not to say that I love it as it is, but at least it's mostly functional.)

I have no idea how it is where you work - maybe your IT department is jacked up crazy, or maybe you're just a peon sulking because you didn't get your shiny new test environment. But once your workstations and users start to number in the thousands, you can bet your ass that you'd better have a good plan to deal with them. That means budget, manpower, and authority, for someone in the group.

As for the original post: if nobody who is actually in the IT group has the ability to set a budget, let alone the ability to hire and fire within reason, you are utterly boned. If I would prepare to flee.

Re:Depends

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually the support requirements in IT are higher the more you've got advanced users/developers etc. because they demand more applications, more servers etc. unless you've got an environment standardized to high hell, which won't really help with the productivity.

Re:Depends

[Anonymous Coward]

if your business revolves around programming and engineering, and thus your workers are from those fields (as opposed to tons of avg computer users in a non computer/technical field), you are less likely to have serious issues that IT needs to address,

BS. Tech people are more picky about how their computers are setup and often cause more problems. I'm guess the 900 workstations are stuffed into a call center and the users have very limited access to any of the system resources.

Re:Proper Planning

[teslafreak]

If you have employees, there is a need. The best implementation is still not fool-proof.

We need more details

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately you are forgetting some major details. Most importantly what applications are the users mainly using? For example their business system, is it proprietary? Do they seek help internally for financial problems within their financial system? I've worked at places where IT was nothing more then the geek squad to where I am now which IT seems to be a core pillar of everything. I have learned more accounting over the last 4 years then I'd ever wanted to know.

Additionally, what industry are you in? Or should I say what do the users mainly do?

Also, what kind of controls do you have on internet usage (matters for malware)? Mainly what kind of issues do you have to fix? Are the users spread across the country or all in a central location?

Basically the complexity of your architecture makes a huge difference.

Re:Lockdown

[Anonymous Coward]

Citrix is such a waste in so many ways.
(1) Waste of employee time waiting for the program to load remotely and piped their way.
(2) Waste of network bandwidth, especially if there is a large number of people using Citrix all day long.
(3) Citrix is just one more UNEEDED complication.
(4) Just install the programs they need locally, please.

Re:Proper Planning

[mirkob]

If a dept feels they're understaffed, they must first evaluate the workload and determine if the implementation is unnecessarily causing extra work . Then correct the root issues (possibly hiring contractors for the interim) and reevaluate.

unfortunately the core problem is the fucking stupid users, no way to smat them up, nor to sack them...

the second problem is the presence of more than 100 different programs, about 2 to 15 are to install in every single station in seemly random assortment that vary wildly depending on the single user...
no way to solve that either.

the third is a continuous spawning of new programs or functionality to implement the week before, so that you hastily put something up, than have to spend 5 time that time to correct, expand, modify, document ecc...
all between a problem and an emergency

without those 3 problem there would be less than 1/5 of the problem... end personal needed.

now there is 4.5 tecnician, and 2.5 administrative to manage about 50-60 servers (half linux half win) and about 500 users on windows pc

Facebook: 1 engineer per million users

[miller60]

Jeff Rothschild, the vice president of technology at Facebook, said in a recent presentation that Facebook has 230 engineers supporting data for more than 300 million users. He says Facebook seeks to maintain a ratio of one engineer for 1 million or more users. Facebook is vague about exactly how many servers it has, saying it's "more than 30,000." But at 30,000 servers and 230 engineers, that's a ratio of about 130 servers per admin.

Microsoft says it has automated its data center operations to the point where its admins can each manage between 1,000 and 2,000 servers. That matters, as the company may pack more than 300,000 servers into its new container data center in Chicago. It expects to support that facility with about 30 employees, including admins and facility maintenance staff.

Re:Facebook: 1 engineer per million users

[Capt James McCarthy]

Jeff Rothschild, the vice president of technology at Facebook, said in a recent presentation that Facebook has 230 engineers supporting data for more than 300 million users. He says Facebook seeks to maintain a ratio of one engineer for 1 million or more users. Facebook is vague about exactly how many servers it has, saying it's "more than 30,000." But at 30,000 servers and 230 engineers, that's a ratio of about 130 servers per admin.

Microsoft says it has automated its data center operations to the point where its admins can each manage between 1,000 and 2,000 servers. That matters, as the company may pack more than 300,000 servers into its new container data center in Chicago. It expects to support that facility with about 30 employees, including admins and facility maintenance staff.

"Number of servers per admin" is to limited to be properly measured, even in your examples. Can one admin manage 5000 *nix boxes that are all identical, running a clustered web server? Sure. Given the proper engineering and tools, it's very possible. Now throw in a bunch of other applications that users request or a business requires and now you will need more staff. Also, supporting a bunch of pizza boxes or supporting one piece of heavy iron can make a difference is trying to measure this number. I know of a couple of folks who admin one box. Granted, they are either a large SUN and IBM hardware, running databases, web servers, and numerous applications, but look at their job requirement in a slanted way and it would look as though they are responsible for only one system. While another admin can have a couple of thousand desktops all identical and simple. And their value would still be relative to whomever the users are.

Re:Power of Scale

[Anonymous Coward]

1/800 for a company with revenue of $1M... That's only $1250/user in revenue. I think it's pretty well impossible that a company is going to be supporting the infrastructure for 800 users on $1M. Throw in the 50 servers, and the numbers start looking real wonky.

Re:well...

[Tekfactory]

You can create OUs of users in your location, and only apply GPOs to those users.

You don't have to Bork all the field offices with a GPO. Now domain security policies I'd watch out for.

Re:Over 9000

[TheCarp]

I think it comes down to "what do you mean by admins"?

The more you restrict what admins have to support, the more homogenous the environment, the better the ratio. The more you expect from them, the more complex the environment, the more you need.

Another factor to add in is tools. Does every machine have actual remote console? (and I mean console as in, I can sit there and watch the POST console). Do you have build servers and good backups, and tested procedures to do restores if a system needs a total rebuild on the spot?

My group is constantly compared in terms of group size to number of machines. Its maddening since we support 5 different flavors of unix (and VMS), some with ok tools configured and ready, some nearly "hand crafted". Then at least 3 different versions of each of those flavors. We can't seem to get projects approved to fix any of this (and god forbid we did it without a project!)

We are compared against a Windows group, that supports a couple of flavors of Windows, and has had automation tools to schedule and do work remotely setup for years. Of course they can admin more systems with less headcount... they have the tools and environment setup to do it!

Hell it took us almost 2 years to get project approval to set the machines for centralized auth through LDAP... and they wonder why we seem to need so many people for so few machines.

So frankly, I don't think the question has enough information to be answered usefully. There are just too many variables to be able to put up a good estimation of appropriate head count per machine. I can tell you though that standardization, automation, and redundant designs will decrease that head count.

As will properly trained/experienced admins (if we could only get them to send a couple of people to basic sun training we would be way better off... but we can't even get that. We have guys that have been effectively working on the level of entry level admins for years, who have never been able to get management to send them to a class).

-Steve
(who should post anonymously but, on some level hopes they will read this...)