Information Technology Cloud: How many administrators do you need for Data centers?

Data centers are staffed with IT pros to care and feed the servers. Data centers need a lot of attention, ranging from hardware maintenance to backup, disaster recovery, and monitoring. Think of your company. How many people are allocated to manage your servers? Depending on how optimized your IT center is, the ratio of person-toservers can be anywhere from 1:10 to 1:100. With that ratio, Microsoft would need 35,000 server managers. Hiring that many server administrators would be hard, considering that Microsoft employs roughly 95,000 people already.

To address this demand, Azure was designed to use as much automation as possible, using a strategy called lights-out operations. This strategy seeks to centralize and automate as much of the work as possible by reducing complexity and variability. The result is a person-to-servers ratio closer to 1:30,000 or higher.

Microsoft is achieving this level of automation mostly by using its own off-the-shelf software. Microsoft is literally eating its own dog food. It’s using System Center Operations Manager and all the related products to oversee and automate the management of the underlying machines. It’s built custom automation scripts and profiles, much like any customer would do.

One key strategy in effectively managing a massive number of servers is to provision them with identical hardware. In traditional data centers where we’ve worked, each year brought the latest and greatest of server technology, resulting in a wide variety of technology and hardware diversity. We even gave each server a distinct name, such as Protoss, Patty, and Zelda. With this many servers, you can’t name them; you have to number them. Not just by server, but by rack, room, and facility. Diversity is usually a great thing, but not when you’re managing millions of boxes.

The hardware in each Azure server is optimized for power, cost, density, and management. The optimization process drives exactly which motherboard, chipset, and every other component needs to be in the server; this is truly bang for your buck in action. Then that server recipe is kept for a specific lifecycle, only moving to a new bill of materials when there are significant advantages to doing so.

Source of Information : Manning Azure in Action 2010