A: There have been several analyst reports that go into the requirements for storage administrators based on a specific vendors' storage products, but I haven't seen or heard of any specific ratios that have been established of storage administrators to overall storage pool.

This may be a very hard number to quantify. I have seen a large disparity in the number of storage administrators to the total storage pool size, everywhere from a couple administrators in a 50TB environment to five administrators in a 20TB environment. The latter scenario was based on the storage devices being in use and SLAs, rather than the size of the storage pool.

Also, when you look at this ratio, are you including vendor personnel involved in managing the environment or just actual employees managing storage? Is tape backup included? As you can see from my comments, this is a bit harder than just looking at the storage pool, but involves actually looking at the roles that each administrator plays, and the goals of the organization.

--Brett Cooper, technical marketing engineer, Network Appliance Inc.

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