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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

#241

Post by yobbo »

jeffbee wrote: post #201
pid-1 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

Not really a meaningful dichotomy.

There is a smooth curve between cloud and dedicated DCs, which has various levels of managed servers, co-location, and managed DCs. (A managed DC can be a secure room in a DC "complex" that shares all the heavy infrastructure of DCs.)

Primarily, the FedEx managers are committing the company long-term to Oracle/Microsoft platforms. Probably mostly to benefit their own careers.

Outsourcing hosting and management of DCs would have been something different, and probably healthier for FedEx and the industry.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#242

Post by yobbo »

jeffbee wrote: post #233
nix23 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Did they pass typical memory/reliability tests and so on?

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#243

Post by nemothekid »

raxxorraxor wrote: post #224
int0x2e wrote: post #105

Earlier 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…

I host a lot on AWS but you will need as many people in IT support as before. You can use consultants for a time but after a while your infrastructure will disintegrate because nobody knows about the intrinsic properties the infrastructure of your company. I believe the self hosted options generally offer vastly more flexibility and can innovate at a faster pace. But only FedEx will know if it is a good decision, per…

>I host a lot on AWS but you will need as many people in IT support as before

This doesn't pass the smell test at all. Datacenter ops are way more complex than AWS ops; why would someone on cloud need IT support for VMWare, BMC Ops, Power management and generation, supply chain management and land leasing/renting? These are the few roles, off the top of my head, that just go away when moving to the cloud at FedEx's scale.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#244

Post by tomc1985 »

pid-1 wrote: post #130
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…

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…

If you don't enjoy it then what were you doing working at a datacenter?

I enjoyed server admin, "back in the day", when your servers were pets and not cattle. But of course we have to make tech just as expendable as our workers, business school demands it! What if your pet server gets hit by a digital bus?!

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#245

Post by fires10 »

synergy20 wrote: post #180
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…

Some might return to on-premise data center, but most will not. It's really just like the utilities these days, 98% people will not dig their own well and install some sewage system and buy a generator, but big companies can still opt to have them on-premise installed, even though some of those are just backup systems. there is no return for the cloud for 98% of us.

You generally can not go from city water/sewage to on-prem for legal reasons. However, many are going on-prem with solar. I am going almost completely off-grid for cost and SLA requirements.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#246

Post by rootsudo »

goindeep wrote: post #65
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…

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…

""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'". "

That's deep and 100% makes sense, I can see how the cloud is both of these "things."

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#247

Post by bluGill »

29083011397778 wrote: post #228
bluGill wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To a company you need to pay those costs no matter what. If the AC breaks at 3am it neds to be fixed. It doesn't matter if you have your own HVAC people on sight 24x7, your own people on call to service it, a local HVAC service to come in, or you outsource the entire operations and so you have no idea how that is handled. In the end the important part of this story is that whatever you are doing with the AC continues…

> so the only reason to do it in house is they can't trust any company they hire Now I'm deeply confused. Any company hired either has a profit margin (plus enough to fund an "Oh shit" fund in case times turn bad) or will not stick around longer than a few years. At which case why not just hire people directly and cut out the other company's profit margin? Assuming you hire similar people at the same rate, using your…

You need to deal with overhead. Nobody does their own HVAC in house because you rarely need them, and would have to pay to train people on that despite them not using it.

In some cases you can even get a discount. Utilities are. Big customer of tree trimming, the companies doing that work can give a great deal because the utility doesn't care that they take a week off after a storm for high profit margin consumer trimming.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#248

Post by hoppyhoppy2 »

IHLayman wrote: post #150
pid-1 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

ML workloads definitely cost a lot of money. Even for a preemptible VM, A100 GPUs cost $0.88/hr/GPU. That's $624 a month for a single GPU and only the 40GB model. Want a dedicated 8 GPU machine in the cloud to do training with? That'll run you around 16 grand a month. Do that for 2 years and you may as well have bought the device. Want to do 16/24/40 GPU training? Good luck getting dedicated cloud machines with netwo…

It's probably worth remembering that a company the size of FedEx isn't going to be paying the listed prices.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#249

Post by yuliyp »

nly wrote: post #28
iso1631 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fedex will continue to charge as much as they can to boost their profits. This move will increase their profits, making $1.50 on each of 100 million deliveries instead of $1, boosting profits from $100m to $150m However if they were to undercut UPS and others they might be able snap up UPS business, dropping the profit to $1, but on 200 million deliveries, and thus they'll make $200m instead, you the customer will ha…

Until it becomes a race to the bottom and UPS drop their prices as well. Then both companies suffer

This is how the "passing the savings on to their customers" happens.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#250

Post by MattGaiser »

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…

Was Fedex really running its own infomatics operation or did they mostly have layers upon layers of IBM consultants? Yes, the "owned" the hardware in that case, but it would likely have been no easier to switch.
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