[ILUG] Fwd:

[Gavin McCullagh]

On Tue, 31 Jan 2006, Thomas Bridge wrote:

> On 1/31/06, Rory Browne <rory.browne at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > Linux/Unix admins are generally more expensive to Pay, because it is a
> > more specialised area. On the flipside, a single Linux admin
> > administrating (lets say Samba) can replace multiple windows admins.
> 
> Which assumes that's desirable, even it is true.
> 
> Depending on the importance of your IT systems to your business (or at
> least the perceived importance of said systems) you may very well want
> more than 1 IT administrator to cover your ass in the case of
> sysadmin-under-the-bus syndrome, or
> sysadmin-gets-offered-more-money-to-work-for-google syndrome.

While Intel/AMD have been comoditising hardware, managers/proprietary
software vendors are comoditising people.

	Pay top dollar for one serious machine
        	         vs
	Buy lots of cheap machines and cluster

now works for sysadmins too, with many of the same advantages.  Let's hope
the administrative overhead of coordinating many sysadmins scales horribly.
If windows sysadmin gets any easier to parallelise we'll be washing pots
;-)

Gavin