Chuck The Geek.com

What is system administration? No, really…

July 5th, 2008 by Chuck Sharp

I’m a system administrator. If you go to one group in a large corporation, a system administrator might be assigned to put security updates onto large computer systems. Another group at another company, a system administrator runs computer backups and replaces hard drives when they die. Another system administrator designs large computer systems involving many servers and must work with business analysts, application developers, database managers, and networking folks.

Other system administrators write little computer programs called scripts all day to help mange these systems, and some sysadmins write real, beefy software in their spare time. Other system administrators design, configure, and maintain networks. Some system administrators monitor computer rooms/data centers all day long and answer the phone and create helpdesk tickets. Other teams of system administrators strictly put servers into racks and install operating systems like Linux on them.

So, what is a system administrator? I guess all of that. Probably more. It’s an extremely versatile career path, and this single title brings many many job paths with it. Where I work, in education, and one of the largest community college systems in the U.S., the systems team does everything in the list above. At my workplace, the backend support teams are divided into Networking, Systems, Operations, Database, and Application administrators. Each of these groups are responsible for their level of the infrastructure. We all have to coordinate to get most work done, because everything affects everything else. In the systems team, we design, deploy, and manage the servers, operating systems, and certain applications (back-end applications like openview monitoring tools, web server software, certain mysql databases, etc).

It’s rewarding work, although no one outside of IT (and not too many inside of IT) understand what we do. The crazy thing is that this is likely to get worse over time. Every piece in the information systems business is becoming more and more independent and separate from every other piece. As computing becomes more abstracted in this way, we are seeing more complexity in IT, and so specialization is becoming increasingly important. Because of this, People even in IT who don’t deal in the back-end corner of IT called administration may not ever understand that the applications they manage are running on 100 1U servers running Windows 2003 with a 10TB SAN storage array and actively managed behind the scenes by networking, systems, and database administrators.

The flip side of this development is that this is exactly how it should be. When I operate a car, I don’t (and shouldn’t and can’t) think about the gas is mixing and how the sparks are firing and how the hydraulic lines are pressing the brake pads into the  drums or disks. I just operate the steering wheel, the accelerator, and the brake pedal, and the care operates as it should.

In the same way, application administrators should be able to focus on achieving business goals, not on how to most efficiently carve out disk space on the SAN. System administrators benefit by these abstractions as well. Back even 5 or 10 years ago, knowledge of how hard disks were made and physically operate were very important when designing file servers. Administrators and system architects had to calculate weird numbers based on sectors and block sizes and spindle counts. As technology has improved, these layers (low layers - the bits and bytes, higher layers - the programs that server web pages, etc) are becoming separated and functionally independent of each other. We can work at one layer without affecting the layers much further away.

In the next few decades, as applications become absurdly complex, these abstractions will be the key to managing IT. Without them, every person would have to be an extreme expert in everything. The problem is that every layer of technology is so complex now that it’s virtually impossible to become an expert in storage technologies, much less storage and Websphere applications servers and Peoplesoft application software and Linux and Windows and HP-UX and HP server hardware and Sun hardware and Oracle databases and the Cisco operating system. One can be good at all those things (but seriously, good luck, hope a balanced life is not on your agenda), but one can never have the deep expertise needed to manage that entire stack end to end. Tomorrow’s information services will require this separation. The possibilities that this will bring are exciting. It will continue to change IT, and the services that end-users find available to them.

Entry Filed under: Information Technology