Cost of Ownership

Cost of ownership is priced not only in dollars but in lives. A career in Systems Administration is all too often a life of late nights, poor health, long weekends, and broken homes.

We as an industry need to raise the bar for acceptable cost of administration of large numbers of machines. Most of the cost of systems administration is labor [gartner] . We were able to reduce this cost enough that, while the number of machines we were administering grew exponentially, our group only grew linearly. And we all got to spend more nights and weekends at home.

While we were unable to isolate any hard numbers, to us it appears that, by using the techniques described in this document, systems administration costs can be reduced by as much as an order of magnitude, while at the same time providing higher levels of service to users and reducing the load on the systems administrators themselves.