Re: Repository services and budget

[Vince Wolodkin <wolodkin@digitalink.com>]

Perry E. Metzger wrote:
> 
> 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.
> 

If you want 24x7 onsite you do.

> 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.
>

This depends a lot on what kind of downtimes you are willing to
tolerate.  
 
> 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.
> 

This is what operations staff do when there aren't emergencies and all
their daily work is done.  Some of them study etc...  It is the nature
of the job.  Again, in my opinion, 24x7 means having someone on site at
all times.  If you don't you risk serious downtimes on the foibles of
the paging system.

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

It is what it is.  And by definition a large, shared multinational
database with 24x7 operations staff and either good private
connectivity, a hosting arrangement or a co-location arrangement costs
money.  You cannot expect to do this on a shoestring and expect it to
succeed.

If you think it can be done on a shoestring, and go ahead with that in
mind, I am planning on buying lots of NSI stock cause they will eat your
lunch.

> Perry
> Speaking for myself, nad not for the IAHC

Vince Wolodkin