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

Th e other half

[ascari]

And the other half runs Linux!

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.

Would this be a good time for a union?

[starbugs]

> 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)

Should this be surprising?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Should this be surprising?

[Fastfwd]

Actually it only takes about $2K of labor to build all cars and trucks

That's probably true of most things/services. There is an amazing amount of "friction"(ie: added cost) from all levels of management, marketing, etc. Some of it is necessary, a lot of it is not. It's strange that the people you are 100% sure you need(engineers/builders) are often at the bottom of the salary food chain.

Data Centers

[electricbern]

1. Lay off staff 2. Hire Oompa-Loompas 3. Profit!

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.