There have been several reports from analysts that go into the requirements for
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storage administrators based on a specific vendor's storage products but, I haven't seen nor 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 as I have seen a large disparity in the number of storage administrators to the total storage pool size, everywhere from a couple in a 50 terabyte environment to five in a
20TB environment but this was based on the storage devices being used and the SLAs in place more than the size of the storage pool.
Also, when you look at the storage administrator numbers, are you including the number of vendor personnel involved in the management of the environment or is this just a number of actual company employees that manage storage? Tape backup included? As you can see from my comments, this is a bit harder than just looking at the storage pool but actual looking at the roles that each admin has and the goals of the organization.
Let me know if you have any questions or concerns.
For more information:
Tip: Best practices for provisioning storageTip: Best practices of storage management
Tip: Tactical vs. functional storage management
About the author: Brett Cooper is a Technical Marketing Engineer, Network Appliance, Inc., as well as SearchStorage.com's storage management/best practices expert.
This was first published in February 2004