Why is the Server Admin So Revered? Orginally posted on the BCS Website on 2 Dec 2008
Many moons ago, when computers were the size of American refrigerators, and you had several in a large room that could have easily accommodated a five-a-side football pitch, and still have room left over for the subs bench, the Mainframe Server dominated all. End users connected to these behemoths via little dumb text screens and stringy bits of cable strung over hundreds of metres, across several rooms, and in many cases, several buildings. These end users didn't have a computer; they had a small slice of a Server, the more end users per server, the smaller the slice. It was the computing equivalent of home baked apple pie. Everyone wanted a bigger slice, but there were never enough slices to go around.
In this computing environment, the Server was god, and the men (rarely women in those days), who looked after them were King. Only they understood the inner workings of the tape drives, boot volumes, and console outputs, and because of this arcane dark knowledge, no-one dare challenge them.
Fast forward to present day, and we now have more power in our pockets than when these gigantean servers roamed the earth. Modern servers are the size of pizza boxes, and are no more complicated than your average desktop bought from Dell or HP.
This brings me onto my point. In an average large company, there are a few hundred servers, all sitting in racks humming away performing discrete tasks. Also in an average large company there are at least a couple of thousand Desktop PCs and Laptops. However, in your average IT Department, the Server Admins are considered the true technical people. They stand in drafty server rooms, tapping away on consoles. They 'configure things'. They are still King, or Queen.
In comparison, the people who manage your work PC, who make sure that all your applications work, first time, and every time, who ensure that you can print when you click on that little printer icon, they never get to be King (or Queen).
Why? It is something that continually puzzles me... During my career I have worked as both a Server Admin and as a Desktop Admin, and both roles have their challenges and dark-art elements, however I feel that it's the desktop admins who should now be crowned King (or Queen).
To understand this we need to explore why people feel that servers are 'real computers' and desktops/ laptops aren't. It's all Microsoft's fault; They have spent years telling the consumer that computers are easy, anyone can use one, and you just turn it on. To be fair, for the most part, in your average household they are right, but out in the corporate space, nothing could be further from the truth.
When you've got twenty thousand desktops installed across the globe in twenty different offices, all connecting to hundreds of remote servers over thousands of miles of network cabling, it's anything but simple. Your average desktop admin has to ensure that every unit is running the same of everything; that's the same operating system, the same drivers (or if the hardware doesn't match, then it's all different drivers). Every PC must have the same version of an Office Suite, or at least be able to open every document type that any user cares to create. Internet Explorer must just work, which means proxies have to be configured and security policies put in place. Drive mappings must be consistent so that when Mike in Seattle tells Sarah in Hong Kong 'it's on the Q: drive', they are both looking at the same folder. Then there's the remote working, which is always fiddly at best and can take months to get right. Finally once you got all that working (and more besides), a Service Pack comes out, or a full hardware refresh project hits, and the whole cycle starts again.
By comparison, Server Admins get a server from the Vendor, follow the installation wizards, and then install a standard OS image using automated scripts, followed by a standard server package such as SQL, IIS or Sharepoint. In some cases and this is something that is becoming increasingly popular, the server box is a sealed unit, and all the Admins have to do... is turn it on.
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