How many administrators needed per site?

[F. L. Charles Seeger III]

In article <1991Jan15.230613.8451 at rastro.uucp> boyko at rastro.uucp (christina boyko) writes:
| A while ago, I saw a posting calling for input about how many administrators
| any given site should have.  I believe the poster was going to gather the
| info and publish the stats.  I never caught the results.

I, too, would like to see more information on this subject, especially from
big name CS departments.  Frankly, I'm looking for ammunition for improving
the situation here.

| Well, due to "budget cutbacks", I am in danger of losing my
| partner/fellow administrator.  It seems they think I'm good
| enough to handle this site all by myself.  I'm flattered, but mostly,
| I'm  panicked.  I don't think that this is a 1-person job. (I have
| ~50 Suns on site and ~15 PC's)

Depends on more details, but it is very unlikely to be a 1-person job.

| So to justify my partner's existance, I need to know:
|  What's the average administrator-to-machine ratio?

Here is brief description of the situation here.  I consider this to be
a very bad (understaffed) situation.  I don't know if this will help
bolster your position or not.  I don't think your employers will want
their system staff to be as overloaded as we are.  Everyone suffers.

We have one Senior Sys. Programmer (me), one Sys. Programmer, and one
Electronic Technician.  We have about 10 part time student employees
(20 hrs/wk for an assistant for the E-Tech, 20 hrs/wk for backups, about
25 hrs/wk for software and documentation support, and about 105 hrs/wk for
manning our workstation lab).  We have no secretarial or other administrative
support assigned for managing our facilities.  The second Sys. Prog.
position has existed only since the first of last July.

The E-Tech spends much of his time handling administrivia such as shipping
and receiving, inventory control, purchasing supplies, handling support
contracts.  I do all the vendor interaction for purchasing new equipment.
Accounting and other business functions in our department office are a
sick joke.

We have 80+ Suns, 7 HPs, 4 RTs, 1 RS6k, 1 Ardent, 1 Gould PowerNode, various
terminals, several PCs and two Macs.  We have 27 faculty members, a passwd
file with about 1000 entries, and about 6 GB of user disk space with 3 more
on the way.  We also have some non-standard equipment, such as two different
Transputer systems and two different specialized computer vision systems.
Our /local partition consumes much more space than all of SunOS (including
OW2 and the unbundled compilers).

We also run Florida's biggest news feed and uucp machine.  Mail sent to
postmaster at ufl.edu goes into my mailbox.  Thank dmr that someone else
handles assigning IP addresses on this campus.

Enough griping about the situation here.  How do *real* CS departments
stack up?  We've heard from UMd Eng (but not CS), Yale, Ohio State Physics
(but not CS).  What about Stanford, UCB (or UC*), Michigan, Illinois, CMU,
MIT, Harvard, Purdue, PSU, Utah, GaTech, Texas, etc.?

Bombard me with useful ammunition, please.

Regards,
Chuck
--
  Charles Seeger    E301 CSE Building             Office: +1 904 392 1508
  CIS Department    University of Florida         Fax:    +1 904 392 1220
  seeger at ufl.edu    Gainesville, FL 32611-2024