FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes • Hacker News Board

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#61

Post by Hnrobert42 » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 11:09 AM UTC

kragen wrote: post #19

Ultimately companies that abdicate their informatics operations like this will give their profits to their data-center operators, who will be empowered to charge them whatever price they want. Because what's their BATNA? Migrating from Azure to AWS when Microsoft doesn't want to let them? Renting your information infrastructure is a great way to reduce startup costs, but down the road, that information infrastructure…

> that information infrastructure runs your company

This is silly. There is a lot more to FedEx than hosting physical compute infrastructure. FedEx doesn’t own all its own airports. A CSP is just another vendor.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#62

Post by beowulfey » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 11:10 AM UTC

chrisseaton wrote: post #44

kragen wrote: post #19

Ultimately companies that abdicate their informatics operations like this will give their profits to their data-center operators, who will be empowered to charge them whatever price they want. Because what's their BATNA? Migrating from Azure to AWS when Microsoft doesn't want to let them? Renting your information infrastructure is a great way to reduce startup costs, but down the road, that information infrastructure…

You can say the same thing for hundreds of parts of a company like FedEx. For example FedEx flies Boeing jets. It's completely reliant on Boeing for parts for those jets. Presumably Boeing can charge whatever it wants. Your company is always going to be reliant on other suppliers and contracts. Unless you're planning on building your own independent country in some location that has all the natural resources you need…

The better analogy would be that Fedex, since they need to transport things from city to city, could choose to buy jets to transport with instead of renting them or contracting a company to fly for them, which they already do. To remove datacenters is more like removing the jets.

Edit: removed rude phrasing.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#63

Post by dna_polymerase » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 11:13 AM UTC

Maybe, just maybe FedEx had a bunch of employees making a lot of calculations before going this route. Just maybe they made an educated decision, based on their inside knowledge of the company and it’s needs. Or maybe a bunch of people on HN just know better.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#64

Post by nuthje » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 11:13 AM UTC

hnarn wrote: post #23

Making accurate calculations of data center cost is of course complicated and rarely manages to take everything into account, but the common knowledge I’ve heard is that there comes a point when a company is so large that going on-prem is what actually saves them a lot of money. If FedEx is not large enough to be one of those companies, how large do you actually have to be? Or has cloud pricing changed to the point w…

It's not just money, it is also how you spend a limited quantity of organisational focus. You cannot do it all, this is actually even more important when you are that big of a company.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#65

Post by goindeep » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 11:13 AM UTC

cs702 wrote: post #36

kragen wrote: post #19

Ultimately companies that abdicate their informatics operations like this will give their profits to their data-center operators, who will be empowered to charge them whatever price they want. Because what's their BATNA? Migrating from Azure to AWS when Microsoft doesn't want to let them? Renting your information infrastructure is a great way to reduce startup costs, but down the road, that information infrastructure…

Without a doubt, a future generation of executives will revisit and reverse the decision to rent all information infrastructure, but that will likely be many, many years down the road. In the meantime, the current generation of executives who made this decision will look very smart for saving the company lots of money for a good number of years. And they stand to benefit personally from it. They're doing the rational…

I used to work with a very smart man that I'm sure was some kind of secret genius. He's was that sort of tech gofer. Hardware, software, didn't matter, if there was a problem he'd solve it. Sort of guy you'd see carrying a thick ass SQL book around because he 'needed to learn it' to solve just one little problem. He built whole entire solutions for the company I worked at in his spare time that the company once tried to sell for 500k and at a previous company I heard he figured out a way for the pain mixing machines to save on paint or recycle it or something saving them 1.3 Mil a year. When Raspberry Pis first came out he was one of the first people I saw tinkering with them and he was in his 50's doing it just for fun, I think he ended up using it to open and close his garage door from work or something just to scare his wife.

That sort of guy. Well he once told me something about executives and upper managers working for corporations that I have never forgotten. He said to me, and of course I am paraphrasing:

"Change gives the illusion of progress". I asked him what he meant and he responded with something to the effect of "They have the habit of changing big things every 5-10 years on purpose to make it look like they are productive, and to justify their own roles, one guy will come in and 'cut costs', the new guy after him will 'invest'".

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#66

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 11:14 AM UTC

bcraven wrote: post #45

benj111 wrote: post #15

What's the 8MW in this context? Is that power. Or something else?

"We presently own and operate four primary campus locations (“Primes”), encompassing 12 active multi-tenant data center facilities with an aggregate of up to 14 million gross square feet (GSF) of space. Our existing facilities are equipped to provide up to 490 megawatts (MW) of power, with the potential to scale to more than 1,300 MW upon full build out of our existing footprint."[0] It sounds like Switch Inc. advert…

Very common.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#67

Post by jeltz » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 11:15 AM UTC

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #40

Ekaros wrote: post #30

Where are they using all of these data centers and mainframes? That is they are spending at least 400 million to do what exactly? To me that seems like rather high figure in any case for their sites and logistics...

Yep... A couple of million of packages daily + tracking a fleet of vehicles, client facing site, apis for their tracking and courrier services/devices plus some internal services (billing etc...).. this seems like it would fit on a few racks, not nearly 400million, or whatever the full number is (since 400m are just the savings). But yeah... old company, they might still have stuff written in cobol virtualized somewh…

But even virtualized Cobol should fit in a few racks.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#68

Post by VBprogrammer » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 11:16 AM UTC

cs702 wrote: post #36

kragen wrote: post #19

Ultimately companies that abdicate their informatics operations like this will give their profits to their data-center operators, who will be empowered to charge them whatever price they want. Because what's their BATNA? Migrating from Azure to AWS when Microsoft doesn't want to let them? Renting your information infrastructure is a great way to reduce startup costs, but down the road, that information infrastructure…

Without a doubt, a future generation of executives will revisit and reverse the decision to rent all information infrastructure, but that will likely be many, many years down the road. In the meantime, the current generation of executives who made this decision will look very smart for saving the company lots of money for a good number of years. And they stand to benefit personally from it. They're doing the rational…

I think you are absolutely right, however when they do reverse the decision they will publish a great article about how bringing their datacentres in-house is going to save them $800m a year and a bunch of execs will grant themselves a bigger bonus for saving the company so much money. It's a win-win!

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#69

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 11:16 AM UTC

kragen wrote: post #19

Ultimately companies that abdicate their informatics operations like this will give their profits to their data-center operators, who will be empowered to charge them whatever price they want. Because what's their BATNA? Migrating from Azure to AWS when Microsoft doesn't want to let them? Renting your information infrastructure is a great way to reduce startup costs, but down the road, that information infrastructure…

Theoretically cloud providers should be able to provide both the infrastructure and managed services much cheaper (due to economies of scale) than a single company running their own.

The question is how much of the savings end up in whose pockets, or whether the price at which they actually sell exceeds the TCO of running it yourself.

Outsourcing at least the commodity part (dumb hardware) seems reasonable, and migrating to a competitor doesn't seem like too bad of a BANTA if you aren't locked in.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#70

Post by transpute » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 11:16 AM UTC

kragen wrote: post #19

Ultimately companies that abdicate their informatics operations like this will give their profits to their data-center operators, who will be empowered to charge them whatever price they want. Because what's their BATNA? Migrating from Azure to AWS when Microsoft doesn't want to let them? Renting your information infrastructure is a great way to reduce startup costs, but down the road, that information infrastructure…

https://twitter.com/cynicalsecurity/status/15407428422381281...

> Clown Computing is an elegant, distributed, breach of trust.

> Take customers, as many as you like, convince them to hand you all their data, the management of said data, the authentication and, while you are at it, the DNS. Oh, and they pay for it too!

> If this was done in real life it would be called a robbery, possibly at gunpoint, definitely in broad daylight. It used to be the case that Oracle licensing was deemed the pinnacle of IT robbery ('90s) but it looks positively quaint now.