Question

ve3ofa  |   Jul 27 2005  3:13PM GMT

Agreed, there is no fixed formulae as there is no typical datacentre. One person may be able to do all the functions needed: help desk, backup operator, print queue operator, patch validator, you name it..

Sometimes management will take a look at the idle time involved in a datacentre operations.. As machines and operating systems become more stable and reliable the level of humans/machine ratio has gone down. In many cases having a hot switchable system is cheaper than a typical years salary for a human.

How locked down are the workstations? The more autonomy given to the users the more calls to the help desk.. Is the help desk integrated with the datacentre?

You have to also do the costing of a worst-case scenario.. the whatif’s have to be considered, proper prior planning tends to reduce costs considerably.

Most of the time in a datacentre operation the operators have a lot of free time until something happens and then they will feel understaffed and over-worked.

Datacentres are designed to just ‘work’ without human intervention but you still need someone to change backup media (dvd/tape/cdrom) and to monitor system operations.. Many times a good operator can detect a problem before it impacts the users of the datacentre. And sometimes there is a catestrophic failure that the operator must deal with, depending upon the redundancy of the system as a whole will impact the operation.

As for staffing you will also have to consider vacation and other non-work time of the operators.. In a 24/7 operation you may need upto 5 people (rotating shift) that do the same job plus a spare person incase of illness, family emergency, etc.

Planning, planning, planning..

HaeCons  |   Jul 27 2005  4:14PM GMT

My experience in this domain is not in IT but in staffing a fire brigade. My brigade has to work 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. (I was looking for a town where fire happens only between 8 and 12 and 13 to 18 during business day. Still not found.) May be you have a suggestion?

Back to the subject. We had to plan a basic scheme of 3×8 hours a day; 7 days a week. This means cover 168 hours of duty per week and a FTE can cover 8 hours a day (we planned 8 hours because we know by experience that a fireman is always working overtime and we try calculate the ?worse? case) -> 40 hours a week. A small calculation told me I need 4.2 FTE to cover the duty time. Add then
- the private absences (vacation, illness, accident (happend also), family duties),
- the training (very important and time consuming by fire brigade),
- Other duties (civil security tasks, building security consulting and audit…)
You can multiply your FTE by 3 to 4.
This means that if you want to assure 1 man/woman 24hours a day, 365days a year, you have to plan between 12-16 FTE !!!

Yes I agree it’s huge, but is quite simple to calculate. I can imagine you can reduce this number by reducing the presence time (Sunday and bank holiday, you could cover only 8 or 16 hours and have people ready on call)

In your case it?s worse because all people are not polyvalent; a fireman can backup another one. In your case, a network admin can only cover another network admin and dba can only cover another dba.

So good luck by presenting a plan to your CEO asking 14*your IT staff to have a round around the clock a person on duty. Regards