FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes • Hacker News Board

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#391

Post by nix23 » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 6:05 PM UTC

varjag wrote: post #348

nix23 wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe in the first day's they survive it, but the flakes are 99% from the fans/bearings, that's why you test servers at max load for at least 1 week and HD's for 2-4 weeks. But i don't think they made even a initial load-/stresstest. Unpack it, trow it into the rack, no checking of internal plug's just nothing...pretty sure about that.

Metal chips is squarely in the long tail of failure modes that you can't really anticipate (but of course really easy to be smug about in hindsight). It is also extremely unlikely the bearings, most likely these are from chassis frames assy not cleaned up properly.

I had some metaldust and it was from bearings, but op said something flakes and then microscopic particles. Particles = bearings, flakes = chassis or even stickers, but anyway just because of transport you dont trow a server into production without testing and inspection.

I am beeing smug about not testing your hardware as you do it with software....shitty testing is shitty testing, counts for software hardware firmware and everything between. Even for your diesel generator ;-)

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#392

Post by res0nat0r » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 6:07 PM UTC

JamesAdir wrote: post #227

mhh__ wrote: post #191

Earlier 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?

I'm assuming FedEx wants to be in the package delivery business, not the owning compute hardware, datacenter, cooling and power business.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#393

Post by tgflynn » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 6:14 PM UTC

tgflynn wrote: post #232

I 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.

It would be interesting if those down-voting my comment would explain where my intuition is wrong. FedEx delivers 12 million packages per day. If each package requires 10 transactions that works out to about 40k transactions per second. You should be able to handle that with 1 IBM mainframe or much less than 1000 servers and I don't believe either of those would approach $400 million per year to operate.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#394

Post by tinco » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 6:16 PM UTC

mbesto wrote: post #293

tinco wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are other ways of reducing risks. You only save money if it's the most efficient way of reducing risks and your risks are purely convertible into cash. I'm quite sure if you take managing your IT infrastructure as seriously as you take your core business, you can definitely save tons of money by handrolling your infrastructure. There's also a big difference between doing so 10 years ago versus now, with all the…

> I'm quite sure if you take managing your IT infrastructure as seriously as you take your core business Try telling a company like Catepillar who manufactures excavating tools to "take IT as seriously as you do making tools"? > with all the enterprise grade open source solutions to infrastructure challenges You mean like OpenStack? Have you ever been in a large IT org (non tech company...like a distributing/manufact…

It seems you're trying to nail down an absolute, I'm just saying that there's options sometimes. In my opinion AirBnB is setting money on fire by running on AWS. They've got huge talent pools of great engineers they could activate to in house their infrastructure and they'd save hundreds of millions of dollars. At the same time there's companies that have no business running their own web applications let alone their own infrastructure. A company like caterpillar I think should be run almost entirely on no/low code platforms. Their research department might run some code, they might have teams doing embedded dev for their devices. Beyond that it should just all be SaaS. And between those two extremes there is like a whole spectrum a business could be on.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#395

Post by bhewes » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 6:20 PM UTC

cs702 wrote: post #36

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…

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…

At least in Oil and Gas. Servers moved back into the personal towers for the first time in a decade. Latency issues.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#396

Post by mbesto » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 6:22 PM UTC

tinco wrote: post #394

mbesto wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm quite sure if you take managing your IT infrastructure as seriously as you take your core business Try telling a company like Catepillar who manufactures excavating tools to "take IT as seriously as you do making tools"? > with all the enterprise grade open source solutions to infrastructure challenges You mean like OpenStack? Have you ever been in a large IT org (non tech company...like a distributing/manufact…

It seems you're trying to nail down an absolute, I'm just saying that there's options sometimes. In my opinion AirBnB is setting money on fire by running on AWS. They've got huge talent pools of great engineers they could activate to in house their infrastructure and they'd save hundreds of millions of dollars. At the same time there's companies that have no business running their own web applications let alone their…

> In my opinion AirBnB is setting money on fire by running on AWS.

And I'm saying you're completely armchairing this analysis because you literally don't know any of these details.

> A company like caterpillar I think should be run almost entirely on no/low code platforms.

Are you suggesting a global manufacturer like Catepillar run it's global financial ledger on a no-code platform? Which implies building the code for it and then maintaining it?

> It seems you're trying to nail down an absolute

In fact, I'm not. The only absolute I'm trying to nail down is "you need to do a buy vs build, rent vs own assessment and make the decision there, neither one is unilaterally true without that assessment". Anyone trying to speculate about budgets in the $100M+ space is just heresay.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#397

Post by dan_quixote » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 6:23 PM UTC

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…

> Its weird to have companies say they're moving from Mainframes to the Cloud.

Ever work for a company with their own datacenters that were NOT cutting edge? The work to provision resources can be so painful that it severely inhibits prototyping. Being able to spin up resources in seconds with some API calls is very valuable.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#398

Post by cwilkes » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 6:25 PM UTC

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…

“Paying for another company’s profit margin as well”

All transactions, no matter if in the cloud or on prem, go towards another company’s profit margin.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#399

Post by greedo » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 6:31 PM UTC

RandomWorker wrote: post #216

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…

right now, they can't retain the people or afford the people to do this work. When you can go work elsewhere for more money you move. And, running a main frame isn't just having it, it's keeping the people running it, plus paying for the electricity and space. Depending where, the real-estate and energy prices are nuts in most places. And, the engineers are expensive right now, and the services are cheaper. It's not…

"retention of existing engineers impossible"

So where are all these mainframe engineers going to go work? Our company has 3 admins for our two mainframes, and these guys while expert level admins for a mainframe, have trouble with Linux and Windows. Same with the developers writing code for the systems. When all you've worked on is a mainframe, then everything looks like a batch cycle...

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#400

Post by cupofpython » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 6:32 PM UTC

stainforth wrote: post #383

cupofpython wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we are giving these people too much credit. Being the head of the organization is like inheriting someone elses filing system. the only way for them to actually understand wtf is going on at the company is to reorganize some things in a way that makes sense to them. High level management is fundamentally hard to stay on top of over time. It's about as easy as thinking chess is easy because you can theoretical…

Yes but they ultimately live materially better lives because of their position, so you can't hand wave away criticism of the value or lack thereof their actions take, especially when those actions can have a negative effect on those below them and even to the external environment.

criticism is fair game. it just usually doesnt account for the reality of what they are doing, and puts them to blame for not directly controlling things that in reality were outside their control. Taking responsibility for the failings of the company i part of the job description, so by all means hold them responsible. I am just saying all of that is tangential to the root of the problem - which is that no matter how much someone gets paid, they are still human.

It's an area that is pretty tough to make meaningful criticism. its kind of a show dont tell type situation imo. If upper management seems under-qualified and overpaid to you, then maybe you have a calling to go perform better and get paid more.

Company management is in underdeveloped game-theory territory. Sure we can isolate one part of their job and describe how they are failing on it, but we dont know the trade-offs being made on a daily basis with their time and focus. a lot of which is going to be company secrets, if it even leaves their personal thoughts. Any criticism that comes down to saying "they should have done more" is likely out-of-touch, for example. Unless you can prove they were actually being lazy.. which is usually not the case, since they are often workaholics (ime). But we usually cant tell if something is a good move or not until it plays out on the market. So making criticisms based on hindsight is weak, as is making criticism that lack the full picture of the organizations goals and the time / energy they actually have on hand to accomplish them