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."

Comments

Don't forget Western Europe

[brucmack]

I work for a Swedish company that understands the value of IT and invests resources in it accordingly. Based on my experiences with other Western European countries, this isn't abnormal.

The difference in work culture between here and the US is astounding. While it seems most American companies see IT as the place to save costs, the companies I've dealt with here recognize that our IT systems contribute directly to our competitiveness in the global market, and invest accordingly.

Re:Th e other half

[Penguinisto]

Laugh all you want, but there's a kernel of truth in that. All the *nix servers in my care mostly run on autopilot, and I pop in only once in awhile to check up on them, change/enter something in BIND, occasionally patch the ESX machinery, or put in the occasional patch that yum or ports can't get out of a repo (e.g. our custom help desk site software).

OTOH, a huge chunk of time is spent in Exchange and SharePoint - mostly chasing down errant mails, or fixing bugs and glitches. To be fair, those two bits are customer-facing, thus more open to calls - but even still, so is our help desk site (which runs on Linux), and I rarely have to bother with that on the back-end. Also, I've run pure *nix email setups before, and it never ate as much time percentage-wise as Exchange does now - even when chasing bounces.

On average, the 'doze servers eat about 95% of my time, but they comprise only 60% of the population.

Nota Bene: One thing I've found to be awesome - get up a script that sends a copy of your Exchange logs to another box... that way you're not fighting store.exe for RAM when you want to parse through them, and you can use a real text editor (vi or EMACS - you pick) to read them.