How many more did you ned for config and support? Suppose too that your network was global, covering EMEA, APAC and North America. I am interested more in how many *engineers* are needed on 200, 500, 2000 device networks, where "device" means routers, switches and any servers that support the routers/switches such as HP Openview, Sniffers or ACS servers, ...Firewalls, etc. Anybody dare to take the number of devices on their network and divide by the number of network support staff you have? Shouldnt there be a paper from Gartner or Giga on this topic? Can anyone reference one? -----Original Message----- From: Dave O'Shea [mailto:doshea@telentente.com] Sent: Thursday, October 04, 2001 4:24 PM To: Irwin Lazar; nanog@merit.edu Subject: RE: staffing guidelines I'm sure it varies greatly based on the type of work that's being done, but my experience with another company led me to think that one set of eyes could handle up to about 200-300 devices, purely for monitoring and outage management. Configuration and support was another matter. (When I say devices I mean routers, servers, and manageable switches) To get at a 24x7 figure, I generally multiplied by about 4 or 5 (taking into account shifts, vacations, weekends, etc.) So, for about, say, 1,000 manageable devices, I would expect to need about 16-20 people. The curve improves significantly as you grow and get to use more sophisticated problem isolation methods and tools. -----Original Message----- From: Irwin Lazar Sent: Thu 2001-10-04 14:26 To: 'nanog@merit.edu' Cc: Subject: staffing guidelines Is anyone aware of guidelines for IT staffing that are freely available on the web? In particular, I'm looking for guidelines as to the number of staff required to support "N" amount of routers, servers, users, etc. Any links are appreciated. Thanks in advance, Irwin
On Thu, Oct 04, 2001 at 07:27:56PM -0500, Murphy, Brennan wrote:
I am interested more in how many *engineers* are needed on 200, 500, 2000 device networks, where "device" means routers, switches and any servers that support the routers/switches such as HP Openview, Sniffers or ACS servers, ...Firewalls, etc.
That's rather like asking how many cars a mechanic can service. At Jiffy Lube it's 100's a day. At Ford it's 10's a day. At the Ferrari shop it might be one a day. Race teams might devote several mechanics to one car for days at a time. I can invision networks of 2000 devices that one engineer runs, and networks of 200 devices that require 2000 engineers. There is very little to link the number of devices to the number of people needed to run them. The time people spend is dominated by rate of change, rate of failure, scope of work, redundancy of design, and the level of support you want to offer. The time spent installing devices, or upgrading them is rather small in most networks. -- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org Systems Engineer - Internetworking Engineer - CCIE 3440 Read TMBG List - tmbg-list-request@tmbg.org, www.tmbg.org
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