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Half of All Data Centers Understaffed
alphadogg writes "Fifty percent of IT executives say their data centers are understaffed, and companies are still looking for more ways to cut costs, according to Symantec's latest 'State of the Data Center' report. Sixteen percent of survey respondents said their data centers are extremely understaffed, and another 34% called their data centers somewhat understaffed. At the same time, data centers are becoming more complex and harder to manage, with more applications, data and increasingly demanding service-level agreements. 'Data center complexity has led to a lot of staffing challenges,' says Sean Derrington, director of storage management and high availability at Symantec."
12 hour shifts are not the answer as well makeing people work every weekend holiday night while the boss / PHB never does any of that.
> 50 % understaffed, 16 % seriously.
So how many of you have to answer your blackberries after work?
Is this not the kind of situation that a Union would prevent?
(just an honest question btw, I'm not trying to troll)
Does this really surprise anyone?
Many data centers these days are no longer run by engineers or technologists, who have at least some idea regarding the technical aspects of the operation. Rather, many of them are run by people who received their higher education in finance, commerce, accounting, "business" or (perhaps worst of all) even marketing.
Of course, such people have a very hard time seeing beyond the numbers, since they usually have absolutely no understanding of technology, nor what it takes to truly run an effective data center. They insist that the current number of staff are sufficient, even when they clearly aren't, and even when they could easily afford to hire more employees.
I think this just reflects a greater problem of the American corporate society as a whole. People with actual technical knowledge in a specific field get pushed out in favor of people with meaningless MBAs (but all of the right "connections"). So it's no wonder American productivity and competitiveness is grinding to a halt.
Other areas of the world, namely Asia, India and Eastern Europe, realize that it isn't the accountants and financiers who provide productivity, but rather the engineers, scientists and technologists. That's why they can build better cars at a far lower cost than their American competitors can, for example. That's why Korea and Japan have broadband networks that put to complete shame anything in America.
I believe understaffed means no one (in the US) is replying to the following ad:
Want to hire data center cat5 cable install tech, mandatory 60 hr week overtime, weekend 2nd 3rd shift and holidays required, require CCIE, MBA, at least masters level degree (prefer phd), minimum ten years experience with "windows server 2008R2" yearly salary $25K/yr no benefits.
Golly, we got us a shortage, best open the H1B floodgates!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
If you want to get a true picture of life in a data centre look at what the management actually do, what they spend money on and what they produce. If you rely on the answers they give you'll end up broke very quickly. The only way to tell if datacentres really are understaffed is if they start hiring more people: any other action just shows the lie in their responses.
When managers say they need more staff, they generally mean they need more cheap staff (often to replace the expensive staff they already have). They could always fill any critical needs very quickly by offering more financial incentives (the only ones that really mean anything), but this almost never happens. Somehow they manage to bumble on with their "staff shortages" and still meet their targets.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
In the meantime, get on your knees every morning and thank your personal god that you have a job.
It's attitudes like that why wages stagnate. Gonna get flamebait for this, but what happened to the yankee spirit? The Founders would puke at the current complacency.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
The problem is that staffing levels are very often highly subjective. For most concerns, the complaint of being "under staffed" only indicates that the current staff feels overworked, a condition almost universal in all sectors of a healthy, i.e., growing, organization. For the ISO 9000-ish (or ITIL?) crowd, under staffed might mean that some formal document published a desired level at some specific point in time, the best against a workload study, and industry rules of thumb. But, since every such study measures a specific point in time, they become out of date, often obsolete by the time full staffing achieved. So, "fully staffed" is ever elusive, and this applies to every sector. We're all Bozos on this bus. In fact, any staff that's manned to the point that they're not feeling some pain risks being seen as over staffed, and a target for reallocation or cuts. Sorry to put a damper on any delicious feelings of workforce martyrdom. People also get mad at me when I point out that, by definition, nearly half of the population ranks below mean intelligence.
Like if producing gas guzzlers that are inefficient and brake easily is the fault of the unions.
I thought that the geniuses commanding those huge bonuses, golden hand shakes and parachutes were the ones dictating corporate policy.
But hey, whatever rocks your boat matey.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I agree with the statement but not the reason.
Doctors, Nurses, Medical Staff, Police, Fire/rescue often work 12 hour shifts and holiday.
However those professions realize and have by experience been bitten by the consequences which aid them in helping the professional know their limits and the limits of their peers.
First these professionals make mistakes during the day. More so when overtired, Even more so when out of their normal sleep pattern. Technology professionals somehow ignore this and think they are superhuman and often promote this.
"Oh I stayed up all night to fix your server!" Pat me on the back! While probably true, I don't want to hear that sentimentality from my admin. It meant something went horribly wrong and I don't want it to ever happen again.
Doctors, etc as cited know that they would perform in a diminished capacity the next day and not schedule surgery and/or the hospital management would know to give them a resting day as the liability of mistake be too great. Safety services know that some other station has to possibly cover a crew that just came off a fire/rescue and be very wary to send the same crew back in. Technology companies ignore this to their own embarrassment which is justly earned.
Second doing business changes (minor or major) on weekends or holiday nights is _bad business_ in that it demonstrates the fragility and unreliability to which they do not admit to customers. Why not do the same operation during normal hours?
Would anyone take their business' truck to the car mechanic for an Oil change and accept, "well we have to do it between 3am and 4am so as not to impact your business."
But it's an OIL change, it happens frequently, everyone ought to expect it to happen! This is exactly the same to me as a minor patch, price lists, firewall rules, and application rules for business policy. Such ones are expected, frequent and shouldn't have to be done like as they are now at a forsaken hour in the morning.
The more complex example is "Oh the engine overhaul is going to be b/w 3 and 4am" - I would say give me another truck that does the same thing and I'll be back after you fix my truck during the day when your awake. The analog is the system upgrade. Providers go into fits -" but but your system was so tweaked, We can't simply move it to another CPU", etc... Blah. Its because most centers don't know how to offer a real solution.
IT Professionals ought to advance the profession and figure out why they are working 12 hour shifts and holidays and then systematically eliminate these events as much as possible till only having to do so when a human life or safety systems is jeopardized.
Why IT professionals are not publicly beating up IT vendors for poorly written OS, barely redundant equipment, poorly designed apps, etc, is beyond the scope here.
Who is going to be the next Ralpf Nader, who will write "Unsafe at Any Speed" for the IT industry/Computing Science.