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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

#431

Post by xnx »

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…

Outsourcing hosting doesn't seem that different from outsourcing electricity. If it's not a core competency, or competitive advantage, let somebody else deal with it.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#432

Post by ocdtrekkie »

closeparen wrote: post #410
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are a couple comments pointing this out, but that's not unique to on-prem: Cloud providers are also buying hardware from vendors, employing contractors, buying or renting facilities, hiring consultants, etc. All of that you are going to pay for either way.

The cloud just offers an additional middleman that also gets a profit margin.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#433

Post by noobermin »

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.

So true. Reading their over generalized screed left me thinking if CEOs are really that useless anyone could be a CEO and their position isn't special, which sort of torpedoes the entire point.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#434

Post by yibg »

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…

Doesn't this logic apply to pretty much everything? Why hire external anything then? Why not do your own deliveries, hire your own trucks to transport goods etc?

There is a cost to taking on things that aren't part of your core business too.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#435

Post by sithadmin »

Guessing they're not counting stuff at their flight sim training center (12 bays) as a 'data center'. There is zero % chance that the workloads supporting simulators are gonna run in the cloud. They're incredibly latency sensitive, extremely finicky, and just getting the stuff virtualized continues to be a struggle for aviation OEMs and flight training centers (though FedEx was a pioneer in this regard).

Granted, the footprint per sim bay isn't huge (1-2 racks, usually, sometimes 3), but it can add up at the larger sim facilities. Several of the major airlines are running 30+ bays simultaneously, with United poised to come in with the most at 40+ in the near future.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#436

Post by luhn »

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.

That's a myth, and obviously false on the surface: What are they supposed to do when they need that capacity back for Black Friday? Kick out all their customers for a day?

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#437

Post by infogulch »

floxy wrote: post #407
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…

"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 e…

Is this a quine where the processor is a CEO?

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#438

Post by gusgus01 »

cupofpython wrote: post #427
pessimizer wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 oper…

I think you misunderstood the previous commenter a bit. They were not saying look at the painting example from the standpoint of the CEO, they were saying "Put the excuses" in the mouths of some painters. Also, there's quite a bit of depth and generalization in painting. There are many different types of paint that are better for certain tasks, eg eggshell vs satin finish. Painting walls is different then painting ceilings, then you add in moving furniture, some walls have edging, some walls will be multiple colors, plaster vs drywall vs wood, etc. That's just painting, lets say the company they work for has a CEO/manager that is demanding more jobs completed, now they have to deal with someone telling them "Do it in one day" and all the compromises that must be made to do so. Almost all fields have a lot of depth and generalizations.

So if had a horribly painted room that you just paid extremely well to have completed, and the painters came up to you and gave you a laundry list of reasons that they failed... Would you hold off on criticizing them until you had a complete understanding of what it takes to be a painter?

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#439

Post by kortilla »

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…

> Because, personally, I'd rather retire than deal with Dell, HP, Cisco, fibers, cooling issues, physical security, hardware failling...

This isn’t really a meaningful analysis though. It’s just “when you do things in house there are things you have to do”.

It’s like saying, “I would rather retire than clean the toilets, restock the toilet paper, etc” in a discussion about whether to outsource your bathroom maintenance. Doesn’t tell you what’s cost effective.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#440

Post by noobermin »

nathanielarmer wrote: post #252
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Today I learned that economies of scale and specialization are not things.

Please whenever you envoke any model, have a sense of scale or region of applicability of the model, no model is true in all cases unless you're religious. The point the GP is making is at the scale of a F500 it starts to make less sense especially if you already have the infrastructure, the expertise, the experience, and so on. AWS is going to manage your VM better than you at your 3 person start up, but the economy of scale / specialization arguments work less well when you have an experienced workforce and developed system in place already and you're one of the world's largest logistics companies.
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