How is the System Manager Managing the System? (page 1 of 3)

So how has the System Administrator's role changed over the last few years, what is the System Administrator doing today and what will they be doing in the future? Well, that depends on whether the organisation is running VERITAS or not.

Before VERITAS Software
Even now storage management conjures up images of IT staff running themselves ragged. Let's say an IT manager has 2 admin staff running 55 servers and trying to manage 150 terabytes of data. They will be working silly hours, constantly fire fighting, working flat out and hoping that someone will invent the 9-day week.

The IT Manager already has difficulty motivating existing staff, especially as budgets are being cut, when what they really needs is at least 2 more heads with skills and in-depth knowledge in switches, SANs, arrays, tape drives, from an array of vendors: HDS, EMULEX, Brocade Sun, IBM, EMC.

Meanwhile IT staff are running around inserting tapes into this drive and that, trying to find the right tapes to use for the right set of data or clients. Tapes are then manually marked up and delivered off-site and a manual schedule is used to determine which tapes are brought back on site, which are for disposal and which are to be kept.

With these old manual systems, storage management is fraught with error, and inevitably costly and labour intensive. At the same time, the amount of data the IT Manager is trying to manage is growing exponentially: with no help on the horizon, how is he going to keep the whole process of data management under control?

Predictably, tapes are lost or mislaid, and often organisations are put in jeopardy through these errors. They have servers with direct attached storage but have no idea either of capacity or utilisation.

As far as the IT Manager is concerned as long has the whole thing doesn't collapse around his ears, that's good enough, and if, at a guess, he thinks that a server is at full capacity the only answer is to throw more direct attached storage at it by using the reduced amount of budget he does have which simply makes the situation worse. He's not just losing sleep but a good deal of hair.

So, storage management has become a costly and unwieldy process, which has left other areas of a business vulnerable simply because of the lack of resources available. So what is the answer?

After VERITAS Software
VERITAS solutions provide an infrastructure that helps prevent these problems; solutions that will reduce hardware spend, manage storage utilisation and allocation, enable capacity planning and manage data storage instead of constantly fire fighting.

VERITAS SRM solutions optimise storage resource utilisation, simplify administration of heterogeneous environments, and provide for continuous availability of mission-critical applications. VERITAS software leads the market in providing highly interoperable, solutions that work seamlessly across the entire data centre (applications, databases, servers, and storage devices), helping organisations gain control of complexity.

VERITAS Software helps IT System administration from service level, to data analysis, to physical device control, helping IT departments to reduce the complexity of managing a storage network environment, reclaim wasted disk space from non-business critical files and to ultimately transform the IT operation from a cost centre to value centre.

Today's IT Managers have no time to send their staff on much needed training.