The Cloud and IT Staffing Ratios

According to a ZDNet article (by John Hazard, March 9, 2011) “IT manager jobs to staff jobs in move to the Cloud“: The typical IT organization usually maintains manager-to-staff ratio of about 11 percent (that number dips to 6 or 7 percent in larger companies), said John Longwell, vice president of research for Computer Economics. [...]

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Virtualization and Admin/Server Ratio

In a Computerworld (Australia) article entitled “Is there best practice for a server to system administrator ratio?”  from July 9, 2010, the following was reported: “We have observed that it can be, for example with a physical server, as low as 10 per admin, and for virtual servers as many as 500,” Gartner analyst, Errol [...]

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U.S. Patent to Benchmark Total Cost of Ownership

Can you believe this?  In 2006 as United States Patent (7020621) was issued with the following purpose: A method for determining the total cost incurred per user of information technology (IT) in a distributed computing environment includes obtaining base costs and ongoing costs of an IT system and applying those costs to a series of [...]

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Information Technology Operation Benchmarks – University

A “Information Technology Operation Benchmarks Report” created by Nick Ganesan, CIO/Associate Vice-Chancellor for ITTS at Fayetteville State University.  The report contains detailed benchmark data for: IT Budget Profile IT Budget per IT User IT Budget as a Percentage of Institutional Budget IT Users to IT Staff ratio IT Staff to Number of PCs – Ratio [...]

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Benchmarking File Systems and Storage

Avishay Traeger from the IBM Haifa Research Lab and Erez Zadok from Stony Brook University are raising awareness of issues relating to proper benchmarking practices of file and storage systems.  They hope that with greater awareness, standards will be raised, and more rigorous and scientific evaluations will be performed and published. In May 2008 they [...]

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Apache Server – Requests per Second

This post on www.ilovebonnie.net documents some impressive system performance improvements by the addition of Squid Cache (a caching proxy) and APC Cache (opcode cache for PHP). * Apache is able to deliver roughly 700% more requests per second with Squid when serving 1KB and 100KB images. * Server load is reduced using Squid because the [...]

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Servers – Mean Time Between Failure and Mean Time to Repair

When investigating the purchase of computer servers it is important to understand the terms “Mean Time Between Failure” (MTBF) and “Mean Time to Repair” (MTTR).  Here is a link to an outstanding article by George Spafford that expains the terms and gives good examples of each. Understanding ‘Mean Time Between Failure’ May 14, 2004 by [...]

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Drupal Benchmarked on Amazon ec2

According to a benchmark test run by John Quinn &  Cailin Nelson, Drupal systems perform very well on amazon ec2, even with a simple single machine deployment. The larger hardware types perform significantly better, producing up to 12,500 pages per minute. this could be increased significantly by clustering as outlined here.  The apc op-code cache [...]

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IT Benchmark Spreadsheets

ServiceXen, an IT firm located in Atlanta, Georgia, has provided six (6) interactive spreadsheets to assist in IT benchmarking activities.  Each spreadsheet is a shared Zoho Sheet.  See below: Data Center Security Audit New Employee Cost Calculator Server Buy vs. Lease Calculator Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Calculator Virtualization Fit Tool

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Benchmark: Virtualization at Amazon

Virtualization Benchmark Amazon sold storage to external customers for 15 cents/GB/month (estimated). Bechtel’s internal storage costs were $3.75/GB/month. WHAT BECHTEL LEARNED: Amazon could sell storage cheaply, Ramleth believes, because its servers were more highly utilized. Source: CIO Magazine, Bechtel’s New Benchmarks, October 24, 2008.

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