[Info-vax] OpenVMS servers and clusters as a cloud service

[Scott Dorsey]

Kerry Main <kemain.nospam at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>My point is that I know Amazon and Google etc. have very high numbers of =
>servers (phys or VM really does not really matter from admin =
>perspective), but their Sysadmin ratio is not 28,000 servers for a =
>single admin. Hung services, hung/crashed servers, log monitoring, =
>backup failures, password mgmt., hardware failures, firewall rules =
>integration are all examples of Sysadmin activities where tools and =
>custom automation can certainly help.=20

No, that's high but not insane.  My wife works in a place where it's about
one admin per 5,000 machines.  If something goes wrong with a server, they
save the user partition, wipe the machine, replace the OS image, put the
user partition back in about five minutes.  They don't diagnose things
or repair them in most cases, because the VM technology has made it so easy
to replace them.

They have a small team that makes standard images, but the day to day admin
work is almost entirely automated.  They have six Linux admins for the whole 
multinational corporation, spaced around the world so there are always two
people on duty on any given shift.

It's a very different philosophy than we came up with.  Hell, I worked for 
a company where they probably had 300 people on staff supporting one machine,
way back when.
--scott

-- 
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."