The thing I see missing in the comments is that sourcing hardware over the past few years has been incredibly difficult. It will get better, yes, but that may have been the last straw to convince them to switch.
FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes
231–240 of 573 posts
Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes
#232I wonder how much of that savings comes from closing data centers and how much from getting off IBM mainframes. It's hard for me to see why a company like FedEx would need to be spending anything like $400m a year on data centers unless a big chunk of that is paying IBM to rent their mainframes.
Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
1000% this. HN loves to talk about Dropbox. I spent most of my (short, praise God) career at Dropbox diagnosing a fleet of dodgy database servers we bought from HPE. Turns out they were full of little flecks of metal inside. Thousands of em, full of iron filings. You think that kind of thing happens when you are an AWS customer? If you are sophisticated enough to engage an ODM, build your own facilities, and put hvac…
Why do you buy servers with metal flakes in it? No quality controll on your side?
Are you saying that part of the expected savings from going on-prem is that you will have to disassemble equipment bought from major OEMs and examine it for microscopic metal dust?
That doesn't sound like it will save much money, honestly.
Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes
#234I've seen two mainframe "replacements" fail to either retire the mainframe, OR produce an alternative system which people like. Has any Fortune 500 company successfully "retired" their mainframe?
Not sure about 'mainframes' specifically.
But one of the easiest way to retire anything, is to stop doing new work on the older systems. Any new project should go on the new tech.
Soon enough you will see the older systems gone. It won't happen in weeks or months, but 1 - 2 years is enough.
At one point the whole banking industry used to de-facto run on Java. Eventually people just started doing new work on Python. These days Java is just another tech there.
Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mainframe = locked in to IBM, is probably the logic.
How is it any different than being locked to AWS/Azure/Oracle/Google?
Its not be most C-level execs are these companies can present it as IT evolution and progress. Balance sheets look different because accounting has costs in different places. It all looks good.
Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes
#236I'm surprised at the amount of vitriol being spewed at FedEx in this post for their decision, mostly about the doom-and-gloom that awaits FedEx.
Either there are a lot of Fortune-500 CTO's on Hacker News that know better than FedEx, or there is a deep-seated fear of the cloud, specifically PaaS.
Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes
#237Earlier 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…
That seems to be a common take on HN - cloud is too expensive. I'm curious whether the folks claiming that have any data center ops experience. Because, personally, I'd rather retire than deal with Dell, HP, Cisco, fibers, cooling issues, physical security, hardware failling... And that's just the hardware. Then you still need to pay VMWare for a decent virtualization platform, monitoring tools, etc.... Seriously, no…
Hetzner is about 10x cheaper than AWS, give or take.
Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes
#238I wonder how much of this is motivated by the lack of staff. The market of available mainframe operators has been drying up for decades. When your entire business depends on a technology nobody is willing to learn or go to school to understand, that creates a problem. Also, from my understanding, it can take a tremendous number of distributed x86 systems to supplement the scale, speed and reliability of a mainframe.…
Would be curious to learn the specs of current day mainframes, and cost.
What sort of work is typically done on such machines these days.
Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes
#239Ultimately 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…
In a competitive market, margins are dictated by marginal cost of production of you and competitors.
Data center/SaaS is somewhat naturally monopolistic due to cost of switching though. Legislation should target "high cost of switching" areas to make them more competitive. Translates to lower prices, better for society in the end
Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm simplifying here, but it feels to me like you are making the assumption that FedEx is a mostly static business, whose IT needs should be all about minimizing the cost per IO or compute operation. In the real world, business needs are rarely static, and moving fast and innovating is extremely valuable, even for a company as large as FedEx. They are choosing to move resources from managing their IT infra to AWS, bu…
Probably the right amount of rented data center capacity for FedEx is not zero, yes. But it's not 100%, either, because what they're giving up is the ability to move faster when their outsourced system administration vendor isn't meeting their needs.
Most large companies do at least some elements of multicloud. This may be as simple as doing ETL in AWS and then pushing the data over to BigQuery for dashboarding, it might be using all AWS and also Office365, it might be building applications which part run against Dynamo and part run against Cloud Spanner.
It's also the case that the applications you run each year have some turnover rate. Maybe you're running Jira this year, maybe you're switching to Asana in a couple of years. Maybe over a 5 year period you're moving from Teradata to Snowflake. Which cloud env do you deploy Snowflake to?
Your negotiating power is then in the momentum of change. If GCP is working better for you than AWS right now, send your new spend to GCP where possible and where stuff is rotating out, move the new stuff to GCP. If you just got a good deal from Azure, start moving in that direction.
This is one of the 'big company vs small company' things, by the way - it doesn't make as much sense for a 100 person startup. But FedEx are a 300k employee juggernaut who spend $75B each year servicing $100B of revenue. They'll have a lot of tech in use.