For as long as there have been computer systems, there have been system administrators. These hardy souls are the glue of data centers, provisioning and managingsystems: a mix of hardware, storage, OS, middleware, and application software. The best system administrators are like human Swiss Army Knives, armed with every skill needed to keep a system up and humming. In some respects, system administrators function like auto mechanics, needing keen diagnostic skills and repair capabilities to keep a complex mixture of disparate systems operating as a whole.

Of course, data centers have become far more complex over the past decade as systems have been deconstructed into functional components that are segregated into centralized groupings. For example, storage has, in many organizations, been migrated to centralized storage like a SAN or NAS. This has inevitably meant that personnel become more specialized in their tasks and skills. However, for every organization that has a separate storage group, there's another in which the arrival of centralized storage has just meant a new set of tasks heaped upon the sysadmin group.