OT: Biggest expense

if you have any serious uses you have at least two people (probably 3) so that you have someone available all the time (with vacations, sick time, etc). a _lot_ of places which meet this criteria have fewer than the 220-330 servers that would be needed to maintain that ratio.

this ratio is also very dependent on how many different variations of server configurations that you have. google gets such phenomenal numbers of servers per admin by the fact that they have _lots_ of any one configuration. if they only had a couple thousand servers per configuration they would need far more admins than they do ;-) they also don't have their admins deal with failures, they just shut down the failed systems.

In many ways I would rather have another 50 servers to manage that fit in one of my existing baselines than to add 1 special exception box that is completely different.