System administration is mostly a matter of balancing available
resources against the people and programs that use those resources.
Therefore, your career as a system administrator will be a short
and stress-filled one unless you fully understand the resources you
have at your disposal.
Some of the resources are ones that seem pretty obvious:
-
System resources, such as available processing power, memory,
and disk space
-
Network bandwidth
-
Available money in the IT budget
But some may not be so obvious:
-
The services of operations personnel, other system
administrators, or even an administrative assistant
-
Time (often of critical importance when the time involves things
such as the amount of time during which system backups may take
place)
-
Knowledge (whether it is stored in books, system documentation,
or the brain of a person that has worked at the company for the
past twenty years)
It is important to note is that it is highly valuable to take a
complete inventory of those resources available to you and to
keep it current — a lack of
"situational awareness" when it comes to available resources can
often be worse than no awareness at
all.
