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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

#401

Post by alfalfasprout »

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…

The fundamental issue with mainframes is that IBM made ramping up talent on mainframes extremely painful. Sure they run Ubuntu but how does one actually get a mainframe environment to learn on?

Mainframes are still king when it comes to transaction processing but having such a closed off ecosystem has screwed them.

Even FPGA's are more accessible to learn. On AWS you can spin up eg; an F1 instance and get a dev environment.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#402

Post by chunk_waffle »

dehrmann wrote: post #317
fires10 wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What's interesting is people seem really excited about installing rooftop solar, but I see fewer companies building collectors in places with cheap land and ample sun. That tells me part of the selling point of rooftop solar is it feels good, and the economics might not actually work.

> part of the selling point of rooftop solar is it feels good

As someone who's been building an off-grid solar system this is largely the case. I've spent thousands on panels and batteries, my electricity bill is only a few hundred a month but we have frequent outages during storm season. It's definitely more of a feel good and control thing. If I consider the cost of running the electricity to our remote location, I'd probably barely break even in 10 years if I'm lucky.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#403

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

whatever1 wrote: post #142
sofixa wrote: post #111

Earlier 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?

> The same routing algorithms have to run either they have one package or 1 million packages.

Certainly you know that running a routing algorithm 1 million times because you need to route 1 million packages is going to need 1 million times more CPU time than one package, right?

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#404

Post by bradly »

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…

I helped with the closure of Intuit’s data centers and it was absolutely the right move for them. The amount of resources needed to maintain data centers world wide is significant.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#405

Post by astrostl »

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…

> 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.

This "ultimate" endgame has been predicted since at least 2006 and we've yet to see anything but price decreases on cloud services. Tons of labor has been invested into deliberate cloud agnosticism with no apparent results. I am fully on board with economic arguments that favor data centers over cloud for some organizations. I don't think the capture-and-increase argument holds evidential water or ever will in a competitive environment, and the environment is more competitive than ever.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#406

Post by bob1029 »

chmod600 wrote: post #347
bob1029 wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Can you elaborate a little? I'll admit I know close to nothing about mainframes.

Mainframes are still the best option for systems that cannot fail. Even business like FedEx is not as critical as some types of business I've seen ran through IBM.

A good example of where these systems come into their own is payment/ACH/wire processing. The consequences of these networks going down are so severe that it is worth it to construct an entire facility with the computer systems and business in mind from the very beginning.

Today, mainframes are more for the type of business that are finding the need to pour the literal foundations for their own datacenters. If you are even considering cloud as a viable path, then this kind of stuff is certainly not for you.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#407

Post by floxy »

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…

"A new CEO was hired to take over a struggling company. The CEO who was stepping down met with him privately and presented him with three numbered envelopes. “Open these if you run into serious trouble,” he said.

Well, six months later sales and profits were still way down and the new CEO was catching a lot of heat. He began to panic but then he remembered the envelopes. He went to his drawer and took out the first envelope. The message read, “Blame your predecessor.” The new CEO called a press conference and explained that the previous CEO had left him with a real mess and it was taking a bit longer to clean it up than expected, but everything was on the right track. Satisfied with his comments, the press – and Wall Street – responded positively.

Another year went by and the company continued to struggle. Having learned from his previous experience, the CEO quickly opened the second envelope. The message read, “Reorganize.” So he fired key people, consolidated divisions and cut costs everywhere he could. This he did and Wall Street, and the press, applauded his efforts.

Another year passed and the company was still short on sales and profits. The CEO would have to figure out how to get through another tough earnings call. The CEO went to his office, closed the door and opened the third envelope. The message began, “Prepare three envelopes...” "

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=the+three+envelopes&ia=web

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#408

Post by pessimizer »

cupofpython wrote: post #400
stainforth wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ho…

What parts of these generalized arguments have anything to do with CEOs? As a mental experiment, put them into the mouth someone making excuses for why a crew of expensive painters did a horrible job painting your apartment.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#409

Post by luhn »

vlovich123 wrote: post #205
IHLayman wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Re data, I think egress rates are going to start disappearing over the next few years. The part that’s always missing with these rent vs buy analyses on HN for some reason is that it’s totally ignoring the opex cost of operating your own hardware which is going to be non 0. Sure, it won’t be quite as expensive (no profit margin) but it’s not an order of magnitude. Additionally, most companies don’t run the HW 24/7 an…

> Re data, I think egress rates are going to start disappearing over the next few years.

I'm not sure why you think that. AWS hasn't budged on their egress pricing for a decade (except the recent free tier expansion), despite the underlying costs dropping dramatically. GCP and Azure have similar prices.

Fact is, egress pricing is a moat. Cloud providers want to incentivize bringing data in (ingress is always free) and incentivize using it (intra-DC networking is free), but disincentivize bringing it out. If your data is stuck in AWS, that means your computation is stuck in AWS too.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#410

Post by closeparen »

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…

You're ignoring the massive ecosystem of vendors, managed service providers, colocation facilities, consulting firms, etc. whose profit margins are paid to manage most on prem deployments. Very few entities are doing it all with in-house staff.
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