Maybe I just don't get it.

I would expect those types of indstries to have a computer on every desk, but that they be PCs running Windows, and therefore not considered a 'server' and not counted in this survey.

Even if the computers on everyone's desk was runing some varitey of a unix OS, does that count?

Oh, sure, someone in that company's tech support dept would have access to any of them, particularly after a user called about a problem, but does that count? I think not.

Or am I missing something?

As an example I work in and R&D site. We have over 1000 servers in the R&D environment to all of which I have root access.A smaller number of servers also live in the local production LAN, in the region of 50 last time I looked. Support for the production LAN is managed gloabally and worldwide there would be over 1000 some of specialists in IT support would have access to all of these.

This does in fact not include the ~ 60,000 "personal" machines on the desktop.

I am AIX SA for EMEA in one of the largest global finance institutions - primary for approx 50 p5 lpars, secondary and oncall for around 150 more - mostly high end database boxes 550/570/595 ... direct root only if nothing else works, usually some kind of sudo with keystroke logreview and more justifications of why I did what than doing real work ... I hate our security ...

Stuff.... Secret rooty stuff.... and such and so on.

*Edit
and nethack of course.

Thanks for the additional info.

It just boggles my mind a bit.

Of course, I don't know what gets me more: the mere fact that the company is using hundreds or even thousands of unix servers, or that a single person could have access to them all.

The main reasons are probably for security and redundancies, a lot of the stories you hear of hackers who manage to infiltrate some site are over rated because the critical data that once used to be central are now spread all over and each site has it's own security firewall so even if any hacker whether inside or outside manages break into 1 site and got hold of the data, it's just a meaningless bunch of numbers and they won't know what it means or what the value of the information really is.

redundancies for business continuity, after sept 11 2001, a lot of major corporations started to change their DR strategies. Hence you end up with many many boxes everywhere.

Btw managing 100+ servers is not easy job, is very good to wish but believe me it's tough to handle it all by yourself. Just imagine you have to install latest sun recommended patch clusters across the landscape, you start friday night you probably only be done monday morning. Or example DBA team wants to upgrade database and tells you to upgrade the OS, security team wants you to harden the boxes and apps team have some change request your work will never get done because every weekend you'll be burning midnight oil and you'll burnout under 1 year.

The optimum number of servers per engineer is usually between 25-40 100 is too much for any a single engineer to handle alone, a team of engineers maybe.

my 2 cts.

The optimum number of servers per engineer is usually between 25-40

I agree Sparcguy, we have 6 of us here for a total of about 350 hosts, with duties including the entire netbackup environment, and the entire SAN (4frames).
Add in four to five specialty projects/pet areas per person at any given time and we are a busy bunch.
The ability to manage large numbers of hosts depends on so many factors such as years at the site, the actual rate of change of the environment, policies regarding automations, security policies etc...