Half of All Data Centers Understaffed 211
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."
Th e other half (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Th e other half (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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.
We grab the Exchange logs off the box every 15 minutes and shove them into Postgresql. We can then use a PHP interface to view them. Very nice compared to notepad on the Exchange box.
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You can use "less" or "emacs" under CygWin instead, unless Windows file-locking causes trouble.
Re:The other half (Score:3, Insightful)
Server OS is not the only thing in the datacenter that needs staffing. Facilities work (cabling, power, cooling, etc), SAN, Network infrastructure, and that's without even getting into the middleware or applications themselves.
Even if your base servers administered themselves, it still takes quite a staff to actually do something with those servers.
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You're not really comparing apples to apples there. Of course basic services which aren't used directly by end users and which are based on technologies from the stone age don't really require an awful lot to administer. They never do, regardless of their manufacturer. Even IIS doesn't really take all that much looking after once you've got it configured properly and it's probably one of the crappiest web servers around.
Exchange on the other hand is user facing and has a complex feature set. I know a lot of
WIndows technical edge. (Score:2)
"get up a script that sends a copy of your Exchange logs to another box"
Woah! Are you saying you invented syslog for Windows.
I would patent it. Fast.
Re:Th e other half (Score:4, Interesting)
-1 or more about not thinking this through though. (and not funny at all)
As someone who has until recently done research in data centers and their operations, and personally dealt with the *NIX side of *NIX vs. NT years ago, I know the reality as opposed to the half-thought-out dreams some have. Yes, *NIX makes it much simpler to manage a machine, and increase the (servers/admin) ratio, among others, but it is not a solution which scales to where one person can administer 10K servers. As you add servers and applications, that ratio will reach a limit where you have to add yet another admin (operational, network, hardware, etc.). And should that site not be willing to do so, you end up with one of those "understaffed" data centers. Where that point is reached depends on a multitude of factors, including the behaviour of those using the data center (stupid developers, hands on users or workload characteristics cause that point to be reached sooner), the applications (a bunch of database servers will likely reach it before an equivalent amount of web servers), the amount of storage on those servers, and even the individual admins and how they are organized themselves. Throw in things like buying the cheapest hardware, or buying bleeding edge hardware (say 1.5TB drives when they first come out, or 10Gb ethernet cards), and it gets even worse as you try to deal with first generation drives failing or buggy drivers.
Can two people administer 500+ servers with 1.5PB of storage? I know personally that it is possible. But to do it and keep everyone 100% happy? No. And that precludes things like having people who are hard to satisfy, having to backup all that data, running it in a non-university production environment, etc. When I left CompuServe in 1997, the numbers were far different, with IIRC 25-30 operators of varying skill levels, about 10 of us in admin positions (who were called upon by the operators when they could not handle something), and around half a dozen or so network and hardware folks. Total number of servers? Around 1200 running BSD/OS, and around another 1000 running either our proprietary OS on systems which came out of the DecSystem 20 designs, or systems running a specialized NT 3.51 load, and perhaps a total data storage of around 1.5TB. And things were simplified by things such as having dozens of machines which were identical handling application X. Of course, we also had 3 data centers, and did backups of at least one of each machine in a given group. And then there is the fact that some applications required the developers to administer the application itself.
And looking forward... There were no regular 12 hour shifts at either of these. Yes, I was on call darn near 24*365 (I got vacation time off at my latest employer, but at CSI, I was on call even during vacation, and averaged 80hrs/week at the end). But when the fecal material hit the fan, and we had unusual problems like a computer room flooding or a critical server failing... it was possible to have to put in a 24 hour shift. Such is the life of a senior systems engineer in an operations group, which is one reason I try to avoid positions like these.
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Re:In other news... (Score:5, Funny)
50% of all datacenter operators lie about their staffing levels.
The other 50% didn't return calls in time to be included in the survey.
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Because they were too busy trying to fix too many problems with too few staffers on hand.
Re:In other news... (Score:4, Insightful)
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That's because you're wrong, nearly half ranks below the median, that doesn't mean nearly half ranks below the mean. If you rank intelligence from 1 to 10, and you have 10 people with a rank of 1 and 2 people with a rank of 10, you get an average of (30/11)=2.72. It actually doesn't matter what the number is, by definition half would not be below the mean.
Now, it may well be that half the popula
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" People also get mad at me when I point out that, by definition, nearly half of the population ranks below mean " That's because you're wrong, nearly half ranks below the median, that doesn't mean nearly half ranks below the mean. If you rank intelligence from 1 to 10, and you have 10 people with a rank of 1 and 2 people with a rank of 10, you get an average of (30/11)=2.72. It actually doesn't matter what the number is, by definition half would not be below the mean. Now, it may well be that half the population is below average intelligence, but that isn't the definition.
That's a great sample size of 3 you have there. If you have a sufficiently large sample size it will start to more closely resemble the normal-distribution model. Keep in mind the normal distribution still has variables to tweak the model, so no I doesn't have to a perfect and/or symmetric classic bell-curve.
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Very, Very few Center Managers actually performed any kind of statistical process control analysis for quality in the datacenters I worked for which were huge and did work for .gov, finance and top 500 and they barely did it. They eventually fired the poor guy as he kept proving management wrong. We had long conversations that helped me understand technology for what it was: "La Technique: L'enjeu du siècle" was an eye opener.
Very few managers understood what project management & change windows wer
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In other news, odds are good that almost 100% of IT staffers would say their data centers are understaffed. IT people (and geeks in general) tend not to say "no" until things are beyond what they can possibly handle. At this point, they're way beyond what should be considered "overloaded". Most managers are not from this group, so they don't comprehend that when we say we can handle something else, we often mean, "I'm superhuman and I can pull it off, but it's coming out of my stomach lining and you'd be
12 hour shiths are not the ansaser (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:12 hour shiths are not the ansaser (Score:4, Insightful)
12 hour shifts are not so bad if you only work three or four days a week, alternating every other week.
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preferable 3 days back to back with 4 the next week 7 on 7 off is so nice.
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...in a strip club.
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For almost every company I worked for the Boss seems to work an average of 10-16 hours a day, 7 days a week and Always on call. I had to do some traveling with my Boss once. Although it always seems like he comes in from 10-3 every day. They are usually working for the rest of the time.
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100% of all IT jobs understaffed.
Methinks it is about time we got a professional body (or for those so inclined a union). They would set things like standards, work requirements, exams to work in a data center, and of course we can use it to make sure job stay local as the other professions do. I mean how can you trust your data to a non-professional data center. I mean, do you trust people to manage their own medicines?
I say this only have cynically. If you can't beat em, join em. We have to stop pret
Re:12 hour shiths are not the ansaser (Score:4, Insightful)
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I see a special assignment in your future ;-D
Shifts and other professionals (Score:3, Insightful)
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
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Analogy and metaphor are never perfect.
However I stand by my statements. When a vehicle I use for business is not working, it is not making money for me (in fact it is losing money). Oil Changes are actually regularly scheduled preventative maintenance. Its not to be done _just whenever_ I don't happen need the vehicle.
It is a fact _regularly scheduled_ maintenance is to be performed as normal course of business. It is for sure I want to keep the vehicle operating as much as possible as to why it is done i
Re:Whatever. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Gonna get flamebait for this, but what happened to the yankee spirit?
Outsourced.
Poor sod. (Score:2)
No self respect, no self belief, no planning.
No sympathy from me frankly.
Would this be a good time for a union? (Score:5, Insightful)
> 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)
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You aren't trying to troll and neither am I. It IS the kind of situation a union would prevent, however considering everything else that has been done for union's sake lately (see: destruction of US auto industry) I would suggest you take the unionization decision VERY seriously. How exactly, considering that funding isn't sufficient for staffing at the current expense, do you expect companies to afford to bankroll a union AND get more staff to man the servers? In all likelihood you will end up with lowe
Re:Would this be a good time for a union? (Score:4, Insightful)
however considering everything else that has been done for union's sake lately (see: destruction of US auto industry) I would suggest you take the unionization decision VERY seriously.
Hahaha. As much as I dislike unions, the destruction of US auto industry was caused by complacent & incompetent US auto industry management.
The US auto industry kept designing & building cars at a price point that few people wanted to buy. Simply put, foreign car companies (on average) made better, more reliable cars.
The union wanted better salary & benefits for their members (entirely understandable, we all want to make more money). But if management agreed to ridiculous levels of compensation, to the point where the business is no longer viable, then that is the fault of management for making stupid decisions.
Get Your History Right (Score:5, Informative)
Unions were invented to protect unsuspecting workers from manipulative business owners
No. It was really much simpler than that. People were tired of working for peanuts. Lots of people were tired of working for peanuts. Lots of those people were plenty smart. How else do you think they got organized?
Before unions, the institution of the 5-day work week was another long, hard-fought, pitched political battle that business was *sure* would absolutely end the U.S. economy. When Ford doubled pay and shrank working hours, the rest of American industry would not follow because from a capitalist's perspective, you are blowing your labor costs out of site! History suggests it seemed to have worked for Ford.
You don't get to blame organized labor for all of the auto industry's ills. Maybe you recall the Pontiac Aztek as possibly the apex of bad auto product? The labor that allocated resources for that project and a long history of uninspiring ones before that, weren't part of a Union. What's the managerial ratio at those companies 'burdened' by Union labor? What are the managerial labor costs at those firms 'burdened' by Union labor? I think you will find them both expensive and inefficient non-union workforces.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day [wikipedia.org]
It's time to bury that notion that Unions cripple an economy. It's used primarily to reinforce the ridiculous American ideal of 'rugged individualism triumphs over all" and concentrates power and resources to the least efficient few.
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It's really surprising to see someone supposedly on "the working man's side" citing it in a positive light.
Ford's workers were paid more, were more productive, and had more leisure time to spend the more money they had. Ford's business was better off too. Everyone in that arrangement is richer at the end of the day.
It may be frustrating for some Americans because it is neither a 'Red State' nor 'Blue State' ideology. Too bad it has come to that in the U.S.
Unions work fine for German, British and others. (Score:4, Informative)
Some of the most productive car plants in the world are there, the Unions in Germany (who actually have input in how the companies are run) would be classed as nothing but communist by most Usians from their brainwashed point of view of world politics.
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I see your point, but there's a flip side to that argument. Just wait until you get older and have to find work.
The classical career arc that was in place from the late 40s until maybe the mid to late 90s went like this for college graduates:
- Graduate high school
- Graduate college
- Get a company to hire you in some kind of traineeship
- Work your entire 40-year career for the same or related companies, with a series of progressively responsible positions that were designed to meet your need for more income
Yeah, blame the unions. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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"everything else that has been done for union's sake lately (see: destruction of US auto industry)"
And what destroyed the US textile industry? North Carolina has the lowest unionization rate in the country, 50 of 50, yet over the past years textile factories have been closing all over North Carolina and moving to other countries. What you're s
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Unions are a great thing to threaten management with and a lousy thing to have to actually live under. Go figure.
So are nuclear weapons!
Re:Would this be a good time for a union? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's going to be very dependent on the union. (Devil's always in the details.) Many IT folks still have the free-wheeling "just get out of my way & I'll get this fixed" attitude, and in those cases union interference in their work will not be welcomed.
Basically, a collective bargaining agreement is one thing...having someone outside the organization set the bounds of your job (and set limits on how you can be promoted, or which incompetent f-up can be fired) is quite another. I won't say a union is impossible, but it probably wouldn't be one of the big names.
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Consider this: The Union forced his major telco management to:
Plan changes well in advance.
Coordinate technical resources to ensure no overloading.
Allowed the technical resources the legal right to push back on after-hours changes, due to labor laws.
Provided hefty compensation bonuses for technical resources forced to work more than forty-five hours per week.
As a result, he
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Short answer: Yes, it would likely provide that benefit, but with several other large costs, some unforeseen.
Slightly longer: It's all a trade-off, no free lunches, so decreasing workload would require more spending on staff (either more hires as existing ones become less productive, or compensation for overtime, etc) which would either make the service increase in cost or decrease in quality. Unionizing isn't always a win or always a lose -
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The problems with Unions is not that they exist, but that they forgot what their job was. Their job is to protect workers from employer excess. For instance working 80+ hours a week for very little pay and no overtime. And keeping working conditions safe instead of letting safety go to increase profit, because the lawsuit would cost less then the safety measure. The problems with unions is that they forgot that and started focusing on pay and benefits. Essentially robbing Peter to pay Paul. And in the proce
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There is a wide range of classifications for people who do not like unions. You forgot the big one; people who have been, or are in, a union and got fucked over by the "Been here forever" mentality. I was in a meeting last week where the union rep said with a straight face that seniority means more than merit.
That's a mode of thought I will never understand.
Should this be surprising? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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That's why they can build better cars at a far lower cost than their American competitors can, for example.
Ahh I was somehow under the false impression that they were able to make cheaper cars due to lower wages, less environmental regulations, and the lack of labor unions.
Re:Should this be surprising? (Score:5, Interesting)
Ahh I was somehow under the false impression that they were able to make cheaper cars due to lower wages, less environmental regulations, and the lack of labor unions.
Actually it only takes about $2K of labor to build all cars and trucks. Some robot factories cost less, some cost more.
Most of the revenue goes to executive bonuses.
I'll buy American made, Japanese managed, cars. But I won't buy Mexico made, American managed, cars.
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I'll buy American made, Japanese managed, cars. But I won't buy Mexico made, American managed, cars.
I don't trust the cars today, and if you go into the past you automatically get into buying German cars from Germany, American cars from Estados Unidos Norteamericanos instead of Mexico, Japanese cars from Japan, etc. Every car I've ever owned has actually been built in the country that hosts the automaker. Most of them have been crap anyway :)
It's not that I think there's no good cars being made now, it's that there hasn't been enough time to figure out which ones are good...
Re:Should this be surprising? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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To be honest, Ford is the least incompetent and corrupt US auto manufacturer by a rather long stretch. Of course they're not really entirely a US auto manufacturer anymore either, but that's really beside the point.
Unions have certainly gone too far. Particularly in regards to the ratios of show stewards(I think that's the term) to actual workers. In some places it got as bad as a two to one ratio, so a total of 1/3 of the people who were actually supposed to be doing things were useless, not even counting
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"I don't know if a union is really the answer in IT, or in any professional job for that matter"
I think that's where your making your mistake. Trying to put my substantial ego aside, the business is trying there damnedest to make Datacenter IT folk a commodity, and it's working. We're decidedly not unskilled laborers but in most cases, no matter what we want to beleave, we can be replaced without a big impact to the bottom line. You are not a beutifull and unique snowflake. There is a substantial part of Sy
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If your company never got itself into those, costs are lower. Otherwise you might find that one worker has to be productive enough to pay for 2 retirees, (as well as the CEO's cut
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That's why they can build better cars at a far lower cost than their American competitors can, for example.
Ahh I was somehow under the false impression that they were able to make cheaper cars due to lower wages, less environmental regulations, and the lack of labor unions.
In Japan and South Korea? Are you joking? These countries are the very essence of technology-driven.
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You're confusing Sweden with China. In Sweden (and most of Western Europe) environmental regulation is actually tougher than they are in the U.S. And wages are not that far behind ours.
Funny you should make that mistake when all the right wingnuts are making so much noise about the imaginary conspiracy to turn the U.S. into a "European Socialist" economy that can't compete at all:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/11/opinion/11krugman.html?em [nytimes.com]
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Re:Should this be surprising? (Score:4, Insightful)
All of this being said: a data center is technology, and technology is a mystery. To top it off, it's not getting any easier to understand. "Cloud computing? What's that?" Says the old CO who still uses an AOL account
Bottomline: spending money on tech is always something the big brass knows they have to do, but do so begrudgingly....
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In the company I work for, the development team was first reduced by half (all contractors were let go), and then further sliced by 20%. Nobody from the business/management side was dismissed, and keep in mind that those people's job is just to tell the engineers what to do. Things got to the point that now we have more people giving orders than people to actually follow them through.
Meanwhile, the deadlines got more aggressiv
Don't forget Western Europe (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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The difference may stem from the US tendency to turn EVERYTHING into a data center. Have 100 employees? You need a room full of computers for that! 1:1 server ratio, after all, your team of medical transcriptioners needs sub millisecond response time for their document shares and non-work-related emails about cats saying funny things.
I don't have any evidence to back it up but I would suspect that more mature companies (read: Western European ones) realize how and where to apply IT. In the US, it was a
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Aside from Japan, those countries also have cheaper labor so cost is less of an issue with hiring
Re:Should this be surprising? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think that it's a big deal that people with diverse backgrounds get into IT. Either they are competent or they are not, and there's no reason someone in finance can't become competent in IT and switch careers.
No problem, but put them at the end of the very long line of folks whom already know what they're doing.
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nope. if for less money they can come up to speed fast enough and become sufficiently competent in what needs to be done, then they are the right person for the job. If that pisses off those who "already know what they're doing", it might mean they overvalue that knowledge and experience. of course 'fast enough' and 'sufficiently competent" are highly subjective terms.
What is "understaffed" (Score:5, Insightful)
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!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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> You should specify "windows server 2011R4".
Make sure they have 4 years experience in "windows server 2011R4" too.
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There's a huge gap between $25k/no benefits/mandatory insane hours/no dignity and $125k and Cadillac benefits packages. How about $60k (adjusted up/down for COL where you are), medical coverage, 401k, reasonable leave time/holidays, rotating call coverage/overtime, and a working environment that doesn't make you want to rip your own fingers off to improve your situation?
How about just some of those? Or any, for that matter?
Honestly, I'd get 25k/yr and medical coverage if I were unemployed. I couldn't aff
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You're missing the point here. Windows Server 2008R2 has been out less than a year...certainly less than 4 years. I went through a series of interviews with various companies years ago in which I was asked if I have 5 years experience with DotNet. DotNet had been around for about 6 months at the time.
It's not pompousness. Although I quickly got there. I'd have some HR person ask me the question to which I would respond with a "no" qualified with why. They only ever heard "no" and would tell me I didn'
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The end of my reply to the other child post is essentially a summary of what you've said; They make insane demands, don't get them met, ship in H1B workforce and reap short term reward. In the end, they'll fail. That doesn't help you now, though.
My point is very much "If you can't stand the heat..." There are plenty of jobs available, just not jobs a graduate of the past 10 yea
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I didn't miss the point. The Decade in experience with 2008R2 was obviously put in there as a joke. You must have not gotten that.
It wasn't a joke
One small part of the study (Score:4, Interesting)
The original Symantec study listed seven bullet points and staffing was number four.
Staffing and budgets remain tight with half of all enterprises reporting they are somewhat/extremely understaffed. Finding budget and qualified applicants are the biggest recruiting issues. Seventy-six percent of enterprises have the same or more job requisitions open this year.
http://www.symantec.com/about/news/release/article.jsp?prid=20100111_01 [symantec.com]
More important and certainly more interesting was the finding:
... the study found that mid-sized enterprises (2,000 to 9,999 employees) are more likely to adopt cutting-edge technologies such as cloud computing, deduplication, replication, storage virtualization, and continuous data protection than small or large enterprises to reduce IT costs and manage increasing complexity.
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Not really surprising; they fall into the range of companies who tend to have enough money to invest in new tech but lack the corporate clusterfuck that stops them from achieving any kind of change.
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"First we're gonna deduplicate it, then we're gonna replicate it! Why? Cutting edge cost savings, that's why!!!"
Not all managers are oblivious (Score:2)
Data Centers (Score:5, Funny)
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Well duh! (Score:3, Funny)
It's because they filter out qualified people who use an AOL email account [slashdot.org]!
Shouldn't a good Data Centre...? (Score:2)
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As soon as Vista stops crashing* on me, I'll get right on that.
*Vista did an update. Now when it boots it says "Critical error. Machine will restart in 1 minute". I'm also getting a BSOD every once in a while, but it doesn't stay on the screen long enough to read.
Not only data centers (Score:4, Informative)
Banks are "guilty" of under staffing too. You call a bank for help or a query on something very dear to you and here's what you are likely to face:
1: A long wait for service after being informed that they've been "receiving higher than normal call volumes..."
2: You then face a menu system that tries to keep you away from speaking to any human being...
3: When you finally get to speak to a one, this human being knows nothing about what you need...or cannot help you!
4: Or if he/she can be of any help, their accent makes you take "too long" to actually get service...
5: When you decide to 'attack' your branch office to "actually get service", you realize that you are dealing with a fella who is paid small amount of cash...almost minimum wage...that they are actually inefficient...
These financial institutions are guilty guilty guilty too.
Re: (Score:2)
Is why I've always done my business with Credit Unions. Even when I worked for First Union (merged with Wachovia, bought by Wells Fargo). And yeah, I call in, hit 0, I'm speaking with someone just 6 miles away. Very easy to work with. Also, Credit Unions, being non-profit, tend to be more conservative in their lending and less likely to fail. There's still been a lot of CU failures in the last 2 years but nothing near the rate of banks. Pretty safe for regular folks to keep their money in.
Cloud computing is cheaper? (Score:2)
Is this why cloud computing is supposedly cheaper (right now)? Someone should look at this as a data point and consider what the remedy might do to that cheap cloud computing. Here's a dot - it should be connected.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, here's one idea: there's a shitload of houses sitting empty all over the country. Perhaps the time has come for micro-data-centers which also provide lodging to their couple of employees. Sure, economies of scale provide some benefits. But in a cloud model there's less penalty for having computers scattered all over the planet...
The % would be higher except... (Score:4, Funny)
... most of the data center staff we tried to poll were too busy to answer the poll.
Start here (Score:2)
http://www.infrastructures.org/ [infrastructures.org]
There's more, but it's a good start.
What they say VS what they do (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Data center woes (Score:2)
All of that is shared between two sites and only two people per day. God yes, we are understaffed. Granted, we're in a transitory period,
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Perception (Score:3, Insightful)
Startups don't have data centers (Score:2)
Not so meaningful (Score:2)
The report says 50% of IT executives feel their company's IT is understaffed, 45% say it is appropriately staffed, and 5% say it is overstaffed. But how often do department managers of any type in any situation say they are overstaffed? 5% maybe? And how do these figures compare with the same question asked 5 years ago?
So what's the next enlightening question? How many IT professionals feel they are underpaid?
What to DC drones do? (Score:2)
Forgive the really really stupid question here, but what kind of staff do DCs really need? IO just opened a MASSIVE datacenter in Phoenix (where I live), and I've been trying to get an out-of-work friend of mine to apply there, but neither of us really know what you *do* in a datacenter.
I'm conflicted... (Score:2)
I'm conflicted by this statistic. IT executives will tend to say that their data center is understaffed whether it is or not, (or more importantly whether they know it or not) because it serves to increase their empire.
That said, I've been in some frightfully understaffed datacenters. It doesn't appear to bear much relationship to the work that actually needs to be done, more so with how good a salesperson the data center manager is. We have two power companies in my area, both do about the same job w
(cough) Symantec? (cough) (Score:2)
"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.
Gee, you'd almost think Symantec sold software for data center management...oh wait, they do. [veritas.com]
Location of datacentres an issue. (Score:2)
One recent problem (at least in Europe, I suppose this may be more prevalent in the US) is the tendency of many companies to move, sensibly, datacentres out of town centres or business districts, but then forgetting that most administration can be done remotely (even Windows, ha, ha, ha) and trying to relocate their IT staff in the middle of nowhere as well.
Any IT person worth hiring would desperately try to find a new job in a civilized place, thus companies are left with people that are not necessarily t
Re: (Score:2)
How? By killing off half their staff in the most accidentally brutal manner possible?
Re: (Score:2)
Pretty sure Dethklok qualifies as "accidental supervillains".