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Comment by mst | Hacker News Reader

That really depends how much of the additional "IT guy" hours are going into desktop support of the (presumably) more complex configuration.

I'd say a 1:3 ratio of sysadmins to servers is actually pretty common -if- the sysadmins also do desktop support for the organization. At one of my ISP jobs the customer/production servers had a 1:50 or so ratio (but a lot of time was spent on new products/features, maintenance could easily have been 1:200 and our automation was mediocre) but the internal IT dept was around the 1:3 mark.

And he said "IT is just me and another guy", not "systems is just me and another guy", so I suspect that's the case for him.

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yeah, but the point is that the marginal extra work going from, say, 2 physical servers to 6 physical servers is not very many hours at all. Sure, supporting the users on those other servers will be substantial; but the hardware itself? not a big difference.

I mean, going from 0 physical servers to 1 physical server is a pretty big marginal jump; you need someone who knows how to replace drives and deal with other hardware problems, and you need that person on pager.

But that person is going to spend a few days getting the thing set up, then maybe they will touch the hardware once a year ongoing. (as you scale up you can lower the setup time to a few minutes per server by using cobbler or another auto-provisioning setup, which is probably going to take a few days to set up in and of itself. After that, you can bank on spending some significant time every time you buy a different hardware configuration, but either way, most of the time spent on hardware will be when setting up.)

Adding more servers just means you have to run down and replace those drives more often; but like I said, if you have to physically touch each server more than once a year or so, something is seriously wrong.

Depends on how large that organization is, and how much IT junk, like mail, etc.. is outsourced.

(I'm sole sysadmin for a search engine, and I handle 200 servers.)

What search engine?

picsearch.com

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