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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

#421

Post by beckingz »

kamaal wrote: post #256
tbrownaw wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone, somewhere, has to actually buy the computers. "Only pay for what you use" isn't magic, whatever fraction actually gets used (across all customers) has to end up paying for the whole computer. Taxis are "only pay for what you use", but owning your own car is often cheaper (even if you only use it, what, 1/12 of the day?) and more convenient.

>>Someone, somewhere, has to actually buy the computers. Exactly, so as long as it's not you, you should be fine. Let AWS figure out how they wish to do it for you.

Until AWS runs out of computers.

It's rare, but there are enough strange instance types that it's possible.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#422

Post by beckingz »

somethoughts wrote: post #417
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 flip side is the approach that Amazon took with AWS. Maintain the server capacity but invent some sort of mechanism to sell any extra server capacity during the down time. Perhaps there isn't the mindset/ability to actually execute this though.

Wasn't this confirmed to be a marketing myth?

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#423

Post by anonymoushn »

nostrebored wrote: post #261
anonymoushn wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If AWS is charging a 1000% markup on a bunch of stuff, you don't have to be as good as them to save money doing it yourself

Which services do you believe AWS is charging 10x markup on?

Egress

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#424

Post by whatever1 »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #403
whatever1 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No, it will take as much time and as many cpus as you have available, unless you manage to find the globally optimal solution earlier (practically never, for the problems that FedEx solves).

The number of variables is not a predictor of time and average complexity for integer programming.

We can solve some problems with millions of binaries in minutes. There are other problems with a couple of hundred of binaries that we cannot absolutely solve to optimality.

Sorry that this is your typical sorting problem.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#425

Post by kragen »

jodrellblank wrote: post #374
SoftTalker wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These managers see the larger trends, rising energy costs, maintenance costs rising, hiring difficult, and retention of existing engineers impossible. But how will the cloud providers avoid these trends? They won't. They will have to do the same thing as anyone else: pay more. And therefore charge more. There are economies of scale, but those savings are logarithmic and a company like FedEx is already pretty far ou…

They aren't playing the same game. Facebook designed its own servers, they were chassis-less, didn't have a mains power input so no switch-mode power supplies, instead they had a 12V DC feed, they had no rack-wide large UPS instead each server had a small battery in it, they were not built for massive redundancy like a Dell server with dual PSUs and redunant networking, because they were disposable nodes in a larger…

When The Facebook started designing their own servers (which, by the way, have lots of switch-mode power supplies in them, and always have) the game they were playing was "be a better MySpace". They were running a bunch of PHP pages. At the time you could have made the same argument about The Facebook vs. Rackspace: "While Facebook would be hiring ordinary IT employees to work in a standard datacenter in a cheap business park, Rackspace could be hiring datacenter workers to work with Rackspace's BGP peering connecting their worldwide datacenters."

But The Facebook decided to make informatics their core competency, to the point of building their own servers with 12 volts running to the rack, same as Google before them.

There were surely industrial companies in 01922 who decided that management wasn't their core competency (though they used different words), and if they needed help with management they'd contract out to management specialists like Taylor or Gilbreth. They met the same fate that will meet companies today that decide that informatics isn't their core competency.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#427

Post by cupofpython »

pessimizer wrote: post #408
cupofpython wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My point is that properly criticizing a CEO is exhausting so it is rarely done properly.

CEO is a very general job role. I dont understand your point with the painters. That would be an operations issue, so I actually wouldnt criticize the CEO of the painting company at all for it. thanks to him/her, I was able to contact a painting company, they showed up, they painted the apartment, and left. I would think the operations team (the painters) deserve to be fired and held accountable for claiming they know how to paint a room when they clearly didn't. Nothing about their job is general or consists of trade-offs. If I said "you only have 10 minutes to paint the room and then leave" then yeah, it might come out like shit and the "excuses" would be valid. which is the kind of time pressure CEO's are often under with respect to things they are actually doing on a day-to-day basis.

i would hold the CEO responsible with respect to resolving the issue and refunding me, etc, since the CEO role is to be responsible for the outcomes of the company.. but he's not the one painting the room. Just like with any company, the CEO does not literally run the company. If service is poor, it is usually because people are finding their way past hiring filters to get jobs they aren't qualified for. Let's not forget that people everywhere are often advised to lie their way into employment, fake it till you make it, baffle them with bullshit, reword your resume to sound more impressive, etc. These people line the mechanisms that CEO's use to accomplish anything at any company.

Of course, the CEO position is no exception to this and I am not saying it is literally impossible to build a case against a CEO. I am saying it needs to fully encompass the position or else you're likely assigning criticism to the CEO for some culmination of lower level operational incompetence that they simply failed to overcome. If a director over-promises to the CEO and the CEO signs off on the basis of trust with the director, then when the bar is not met later of course the CEO will be held responsible but the reality of fault sits with the director, or maybe a subordinate to the director who convinced the director that the over-promise was doable. You then have to get into the weeds of whether or not there were signs the CEO should have seen as to not trust the director, or if they had reason to overrule the directors approach, etc. you then have to do similar things across all areas of the company to derive a valid criticism that the CEO is the common denominator in it all.

Leadership is significantly harder to criticize appropriately than operations. Personally, I would like to stop reading meaningless criticisms from people who want to complain and be heard but dont want to do the work necessary to make a valid complaint.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#428

Post by kortilla »

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.

> they ultimately live materially better lives because of their position

This is a bullshit reason based on jealousy, not reason.

> when those actions can have a negative effect on those below them and even to the external environment

This is the real reason it’s fair to be very critical of their maneuvers.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#429

Post by iancmceachern »

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…

It's like oracle

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#430

Post by TimTheTinker »

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…

I'll be really curious how much change Oxide will bring to the status quo.

The promise is to be able to pay up front for a rack that will function as a highly capable VM, storage, and/or compute host, without any of the overhead that Dell, HP, and IBM bring. Just plug it in and start giving it workloads to do. All config can be done through the web-based management console or via the API, just like AWS.

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