There's not really a market for three big airline shipping things. Amazon air + UPS are tag teaming them in a bad way. This isn't about IT, it's about that FedEx is not in great shape.
FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes
161–170 of 573 posts
Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes
#162Are they really going to save 400 m$, or was it the figure "promised" by the shop that will handle the migration?
>Are they really going to save 400 m$
I'm sure they'll save many millions.
Earlier this year I left FedEx after 15 1/2 years of service. Every single day I used an IBM AS/400 terminal to interact with several systems to do my job, the bulk of my job was done via that terminal. Yeah, that's how old most of FedEx's tech is. A few months before I left they had just migrated one of our in-house systems over to Oracle likely as part of this. That said, the mission-critical system was having almost daily errors/downtime once migrated to Oracle soooo...
I imagine some of this is the simple fact that they need to replace these severely aging, no longer supported, IBM AS/400 servers throughout the company. They lost hardware support around 2020 and, if I'm not mistaken, haven't been made since like 2008 or something. That alone is going to save a pretty penny in new hardware and energy costs as well as free up physical space at often already crowded areas.
It'll also save time-lost costs. Any time power would go out at our building, the servers would usually be done for tens of minutes even with the generator kicking on. We'd lose a couple of hours a year usually to the servers that were in our building coming back online. A couple of hours, times 100~ employees at one site, equals a LOT of backlog being created which ripples through the company. While that few thousand dollars they're paying employees during that downtime isn't much, it would cascade and disrupt the freight handling. If a single package didn't clear customs in time, then it might end up as an overage and have to go to a bonded cage, that's now 2 extra movements added, that's freight planning for possibly multiple trucks that will be part of the delivery once the package landed in the United States, you might see a thousand or more shipments (that may or may not be single package shipments) now needing to be handled extra at a half dozen ports, even more sort facilities, and even more local facilities. That's just from 1 office losing power for say a half hour.
Moving those servers to a cloud provider should provide a much better uptime which should translate to a notable savings in the above situations.
Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not only about size, there's also workloads to take into consideration. Take FedEx, their operations are highly dynamic - per day but also per period. The number of packages sent, and being transported, vary greatly between a random Tuesday 15:00 and the weeks before holidays. In such a scenario, with your own infrastructure, you need to overprovision, by a lot, to be able to handle the heaviest load possible, a…
The cost does not scale linearly with the #of packages. A table with 1 entry is not cheaper than a table with 1 million entries. The same routing algorithms have to run either they have one package or 1 million packages. Plus you need to keep the history of the operations for months if not years (meaning that you will store both holiday and random Tuesday data anyway). So where is this flexible cost exactly?
May I point you to the DynamoDB docs? Costs scale along the dimensions of storage and activity. A 1 entry table is essentially free if you use on-demand RCU/WCU provisioning.
Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes
#164Earlier 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…
The exact same thing can be said about the IBM mainframes they are replacing. Which is a much older business model.
Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes
#165Lol “saving $400m” really equates to “moving onto AWS or Azure and paying hundreds of millions to them”
Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes
#166Earlier 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…
> the pain mixing machines That sounds ... dystopian.
This is what grabbed me to kee pop reading his story
Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes
#167Ultimately 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…
The "real world" counterpoint to this somewhat abstract notion is that even if FedEx wanted to build on-prem, there is not enough cloud ai talent in the universe to meet future demand. It's not just their pref for academic sanctuary, it's that there simply aren't enough cloud architects & AI PhD's with experience at AWS scale. It's hard. Choice is an illusion. GCP AutoML, Tableau, Bubble. Way simpler to train fresh grads via cloud native tooling, than from the cli (the way we did things) ;)
I think the digital transformation to watch is the US Government's IRS Tax Cloud. Never been into taxation law & policy wonkery myself, but Tax Cloud is purported to Save Trillions in TCO!
Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes
#168Ultimately 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…
Even in CS we call it "loose coupling". There is no no-coupling.
I agree with you, that the hype train "cloud = total freedom" (whatever that means) is rubbish. More and more it seems, that a cloud model is just yet another option between Mainframe, AWS, Google Cloud etc.
Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
However, when the situation starts to become unbearable, how long will it take to rebuild the infrastructure and source talent? Another decade? Adding the startup costs for any possible rebuild, you're apt for a substantial net loss. So you're probably going to shy away from such a reintegration, while losses accumulate further, until this becomes unsustainable, putting the entire corporation at risk. (The wise thing…
Will it? If they do this right it won't. There is a large cost running a data center. So long as long as there is competition they are better off with experts doing computers while they focus on logistics which is what they do well. Of course they should make some effort to ensure there is competition. That means they are careful to ensure more than one provider exists even if it means taking a slightly higher priced…
> Of course they should make some effort to ensure there is competition.
My guess is, we'll rather see some consolidation, like in every other segment. Which also means considerable expenses for the remaining players, who will experience increasing need to regain some by pricing. As theses players are sharing roughly the same boat, this will show quite naturally some characteristics of an oligopoly. At the same time, self-managed infrastructure will have become a rarity and costs of reintegration are prohibitive, which should allow for some elasticity in market prices. Also, any investments towards reintegration won't show results during the turn of current management, minimizing chances for this to happen, yet again. (This is not a level playfield anymore.)
Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes
#170This is an ideal project for managers whose end of year bonus is linked to immediate cost savings. Who cares if it costs FedEx more in the long run?