Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

datacenterdynamics.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 573 posts

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#281

Post by pbalau »

nemothekid wrote: post #243
raxxorraxor wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is because most people insist on not acknowledging that running your own datacenter will involve "mundane" tasks as "sourcing bolts on a Sunday before Thanks Giving". For a great deal of the people I spoke to, "running your own datacenter" means "we hired 3 servers from a thing in London and we had 1 guy installing linux on them".

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#282

Post by fblp »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #186
mbesto wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> rent all information infrastructure Most of them were renting most of the infra anyway: - Co-location (physical space rented) - Managed service to keep the lights on (power, back-up generators) - Leased hardware that gets replaced every 3 years - Managed service for switch, firewall, etc. monitoring - ISP, back-up generators, etc. > but that will likely be many, many years down the road They're going to explain to…

You're paying for all of that whether it's the cloud or on-prem. The only real difference if you're a large company is whether you're paying another company's profit margin as well. If you are big enough to have your own datacenter, you are paying Amazon enough to buy that much physical space, power, bandwidth, IT staff, etc. plus funding Bezos' trips to space. There's a justifiable niche where you're too small to ju…

The profits by cloud providers are still limited by a competitive environment. Multiple cloud providers have a strong incentive to compete and keep prices low. It's much more difficult to switch from in-house data infra so they aren't as focused on efficiencies.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#283

Post by alexvoda »

menzoic wrote: post #262
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…

>Renting your information infrastructure is a great way to reduce startup costs, but down the road, that information infrastructure runs your company. Trying to outsource it is like trying to outsource upper management. This isn't a one size fits all thing. For a company like FedEx I don't see the advantage of owning their own data centers. They just don't have the scaling challenges that would require that. Data cen…

Difference being that FedEx pays 0 $/km for the roads, but the $/GB and $/GHz will be at the mercy of their cloud provider.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#284

Post by kjs3 »

Someone1234 wrote: post #153
TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #136

I'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?

I've seen it. It was essentially four steps: - Build middleware (REST API endpoint) in front of the mainframe that was 1:1 mainframe functions. It initially does nothing except auth and routing. - Re-write/migrate all other software from using the mainframe directly to using the new middleware. - Work to further restrict anything directly connecting to the mainframe aside from the middleware, including staff's termin…

This is (essentially) how I've seen it done as well, the very few times I've seen it done successfully. But did you guys do it in 2 years, like these folks think they are?

The hardest part about the above isn't the tech, it is the internal norms that you're fighting against

This is so true it's almost painful.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#285

Post by bob1029 »

filereaper wrote: post #189

Its weird to have companies say they're moving from Mainframes to the Cloud. The Mainframe is a sort of cloud, each one has usually double the spare capacity and you call IBM to unlock it. The cost of running a Mainframe is measured in terms of MIPS based on amount of compute used and there's compute reserved for offloading things like JITs (zAAPS). Essentially a version of cloud compute costs. I can understand if yo…

> Or is everyone here caught up in the "Mainframe old" falsehood.

It's probably this. I've spent time trying to advocate for the benefits of these systems, but its like shooting a super soaker into the sun.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#286

Post by hoofhearted »

hoofhearted wrote: post #88
ajsnigrutin wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Their Memphis air hub processes 2 million packages by itself during the season. You also forgot to include FedEx Freight in your estimate.

edit - Autocorrect was terrible on my phone today!... The Fedex Memphis air hub processes more than 2 million packages a day itself during the winter holiday peak season.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#287

Post by pfisherman »

menzoic wrote: post #262
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…

>Renting your information infrastructure is a great way to reduce startup costs, but down the road, that information infrastructure runs your company. Trying to outsource it is like trying to outsource upper management. This isn't a one size fits all thing. For a company like FedEx I don't see the advantage of owning their own data centers. They just don't have the scaling challenges that would require that. Data cen…

> They just don't have the scaling challenges that would require that.

I don’t know about that. They are a global logistics organization that rivals Amazon in scale. They are not parsing web scale data like Google, but as far as meatspace data goes they are they seem to be about as big as it gets?

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#288

Post by CarbonCycles »

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…

Oh man...Dell is terrible about this. Not sure what the policy is anymore (esp since they went private), but to get promoted you had implement a significant cost savings project, which ironically lead to multiple implementations and reversals of policies...they all showed a cost savings but it depended on your perspective.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#289

Post by IMSAI8080 »

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…

The other thing is nVidia try and sell GPUs with similar performance at two very different prices. One price for data centres and a quite different price to kids. If you do the job yourself you can often get away with using the much cheaper gamer grade cards for AI work (unless you need a lot of VRAM), whereas such as AWS can't do that and are required by nVidia to use the considerably more expensive cards. If your workload will fit on a gamer grade card there's no contest on price between an on-prem system and the cloud.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#290

Post by yobbo »

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…

> For example FedEx flies Boeing jets

This, in particular, is a bad argument since jets are replaceable and interchangeable.

Possibly, the only thing that is not replaceable in FedEx is their information system.

Post reply on HN