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FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

datacenterdynamics.com

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Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#131

Post by whatever1 »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #100
transpute wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 br…

The transfer of various liabilities is omitted from the above tweets, which is clearly worth something to some people.

What liabilities? Cloud operators are breached on a monthly basis and there are no repercussions.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#132

Post by beowulfey »

chrisseaton wrote: post #121
beowulfey wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but you are comparing to having a datacenter vs removing the datacenter completely. In this example FedEx has removed the datacenter completely, instead relying on someone else’s servers. So the correct comparison is to remove the jets and let someone else fly for you.

> So the correct comparison That may be your comparison but it’s not the one I meant.

I should have said the more appropriate comparison rather than phrasing it rudely as I did; sorry for that.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#133

Post by geodel »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #72
Out_of_Characte wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technology scales faster than fedex's data needs. Maybe somewhere in the future the reverse trend happens as their needs can be met with very small servers. Though I've always been wary of putting your data somewhere because getting your data to a competitor costs alot of money.

> Technology scales faster than fedex's data needs. I don't think this sentence has meaning

I mean it is like executive statement e.g. Real time analytics in Cloud IoT on Edge.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#134

Post by dopylitty »

tinco wrote: post #93
baud147258 wrote: post #12

Are they really going to save 400 m$, or was it the figure "promised" by the shop that will handle the migration?

There's not a company in the world that spends more than $1m annually on cloud costs that has saved money by doing so. You don't go to the cloud to save money, you go to the cloud to reduce technological risk. If you go to the cloud you don't need to fire anyone for choosing IBM, you're not getting strangled by any Oracle contracts, you're not gonna lose all your data because of security holes in your use of Microsof…

>You're also not going to be dealing with downtime because you couldn't find staff talented off to properly configure your Cisco networking equipment.

>Your system administrators department is not gonna block any innovative employee initiatives because of the strain maintaining more projects puts on a deployment stack carrying 150 different projects but which was architected to solve a single business goal 15 years ago.

As someone in the “cloud” team at a legacy enterprise I strongly disagree with both of these points.

Cloud networking is as complicated as anything the Cisco people ever did but instead of CCNA you have certifications that barely scratch the surface of the complexity. So you get cloud people who barely understand the platform they’re administering flying by the seats of their pants. And instead of having a networking team to focus on networking the same people trying to figure out static routing across regions in AWS are also the people responsible for migrating EC2 instances from GP2 to GP3 but they were deployed with cloudformation which will replace the instance if your change of the disk type.

So getting to the second point this team will be totally overwhelmed and likely inexperienced so good luck getting them to do anything to help your “innovative” project because right hope they’re too busy trying to figure out how EKS is using up all the IP addresses in us-west-2.

Executives who think they’ll save on money by moving to the cloud are delusional. They’re also delusional if they think it’ll increase stability or resilience. And that’s not even getting into the EMR clusters the “data science” team spun up and left running at $30k/day.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#135

Post by JumpCrisscross »

kragen wrote: post #116
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> companies that abdicate their informatics operations like this will give their profits to their data-center operators Is the expectation data centre operators will see margin expansion? (Genuine question.) I had thought data centres were increasingly becoming commoditised.

Yes, a cloud vendor is a company that has literally all of your company's data and a plethora of cloud services that are subtly incompatible with their competitor's offerings, and their machines make the millisecond-by-millisecond decisions about what your company does. They are in a position to calculate precisely how much you can afford to pay them without going bankrupt, and charge you $1 less. Oracle has aspired…

> cloud vendor is a company that has literally all of your company's data and a plethora of cloud services that are subtly incompatible with their competitor's offerings

Balancing vendor lock-in against efficiency is the remit of a half-competent CIO or equivalent. Going cloud doesn’t require using every niche AWS feature.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#137

Post by bluGill »

TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #98
goindeep wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm 53, and I've worked for 3 Fortune 250's. Can confirm. I've seen this happen over and over again. Senior management makes some broad pronouncements, and the mid-level lieutenants have meetings with consultants, and then implement new, expensive projects that "will surely fix 'it' this time." Five to ten years later, after the dust settles, and we figure out that we've strapped YET ANOTHER LAYER of technical debt o…

8-10 years is as long as senior executives last, if they don't make a big change then thee is no way to take credit for their vision. Even if the company had a "perfect" org chart (as if such a thing is possible), they need to make changes otherwise someone will say that they old org chart is the cause of success and they as a leader were not worth anything.

I don't know if the above fear would actually play out, nobody is willing to not make changes to find out.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#138

Post by hotpotamus »

bythckr wrote: post #120

I never understood the logic behind companies abandoning their own data centers and moving their gold (Data is the new gold) into somebody else hand. I see that many here are also thinking in the same line. But when I spoke to a CTO of a F500 company. This was the take he had. He feels one of the major driving force is to reduce the carbon foot print of the company. His company is designing the system to have the cru…

I'm skeptical of the carbon footprint thing for a few reasons, but the other point is interesting and something I think about once in awhile. As we build out more and more bandwidth, compute, storage, and APIs to tie them all together, it seems that the world more resembles some sort of large computer and most of the work is just getting the data and compute closer together when needed and minimizing costs when it's not. I know I'm far from the first to have this realization.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#139

Post by goldenkey »

tunap wrote: post #51
cs702 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sounds a lot like farming out NOC-Ops to Wipro. Somebody had to think it was a good idea & managed to sell it to the policy makers for a nice promotion. So, when reality hits, does the same person get demoted further down than their original ladder rung?

They are gone by that point, with a padded resume to boot :-)

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#140

Post by ClumsyPilot »

sokoloff wrote: post #8
Thorentis wrote: post #4

Is there any gain here aside from cost saving? Will this saving be passed on to the customer? ( laughs ). What happens when the inevitable AWS outage then causes a global shipping bottleneck? Have we still not learnt that having sovereignty is better than saving money? Has COVID taught us nothing? sigh

What’s to gain other than $400M in savings every year indeed? If it drops all the way to the bottom line, that would boost their 2022 profits by 35% and 2021 profits by about 45%. Seems like a decision you have to consider, even with possible failure modes.

In a security business, if you drop all precautions your profit margin becomes 100%! Great business decision!
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