Re: Repository services and budget

["Perry E. Metzger" <perry@piermont.com>]

Vince Wolodkin writes:
> The numbers below look pretty reasonable.  The only one I would question
> is the NOC support people.  In my experience running a computer center,
> if you want three people you either need to hire 5 or contract with a
> organization who will ensure that you have a qualified person on your
> site every shift every day.  You will also have to cover 7 days a week
> so I might double your number.  By my figures 24 x 7 at roughly $25/hour
> for qualified personnel through a contracting outfit will cost about
> $240,000, bumping the grand total to just over $1.5 million.

Its far from clear you need that many support people.

The central machines will work fine on their own 99.9% of the
time. The only time anyone needs to contact the people running those
machines is if they go down. No one gets access without being part of
core, you know.

If you really need 24x7 coverage, an answering service and pager will
probably do it for you just fine. Monitoring software can take care of
alerting the operations folks if there is a problem.

Furthermore, many organizations contracting to do the work will likely
have existing 24x7 operations staffs who can deal with the
problem. Remember that these machines will involve essentially no work
other than backups on an ordinary basis. You care about the marginal
work imposed on such a staff -- you don't need the 24 hour staff just
for this. They'd end up spending all day and all night playing cards
or watching videos. There would be nothing for them to do.

The price numbers I've seen, which keep rocketing up, seem way
overinflated. This is not a multimillion dollar operation.

Perry
Speaking for myself, nad not for the IAHC