I think they will regret this in the long run when they have disagreements with their providers or their providers go bankrupt and fold overnight because of corporate mismanagement/thievery (ala Enron). Even Amazon and Google will go under eventually...
FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes
441–450 of 573 posts
Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes
#442Earlier quoted context omitted.
What liabilities? Cloud operators are breached on a monthly basis and there are no repercussions.
What makes you think F500 companies don't get breached all the time?
Exactly. I know if a large bank that went to the cloud after one of its infrastructure employees walked away with data on a USB stick.
Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes
#443Ultimately 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 is 100%.
Cloud services are about to evolve in ways that non tech-specialized companies can replicate on their own. Cybersecurity requirements will grow and bandwidths will be pushed to the limits. Just leave it to the professionals.
Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes
#444Ultimately 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…
Why be an information infrastructure company on top of a delivery company? Why would they want to do both if they didn't need to. And pretty much all companies are going multi-vendor to avoid lockin and provide leverage for negotiations. Their information is the part that runs the company, not the stack.
Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes
#445Earlier 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.
> 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.
>This is a bullshit reason based on jealousy, not reason.
Reality is not zero sum, but neither are resources infinite. Is it really bullshit to critique more thoroughly that to which more of the finite resources are dedicated?
Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes
#446Ultimately 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…
My company built a data center that was supposed to lead us into the future, and it started running out of capacity within a few years. The cloud is the only reasonable way to keep up with exploding compute demands.
Exactly, they literally design their own hardware. To me it's like trying to roll your own word processor. You can but unless it's core to your business, it's cheaper to buy.
Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes
#447Ultimately 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…
My company built a data center that was supposed to lead us into the future, and it started running out of capacity within a few years. The cloud is the only reasonable way to keep up with exploding compute demands.
This seems to imply that if processing loads for a given line of business start to level off, it may lead some to move away from the cloud.
Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes
#448Earlier 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 better analogy is a ship sailing against the wind: "To reach its target, sailors that intend to travel windward to a point in line with the exact wind direction will need to zig-zag in order to reach its destination. This technique is tacking."
https://www.lifeofsailing.com/post/how-to-sail-against-the-w...
Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes
#449Earlier 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'm more or the less the sole decider for all tech decisions in my org (I don't have full budget authority, but I tell the budget holders what things cost). I'm 100% on board with cloud and even going further up the value chain to PaaS and SaaS. Cloud is expensive, but predictable. DevOps is very expensive and unpredictable. I can't even keep staff retained these days. Having a fixed dollar cost, even if it's high, saves not only the operations cost, but also the accounting cost and recruiting cost. And not just cost, but risk! Managed services are generally lower risk, and even if they aren't you can buy some indemnity that they'll cover some of the cost of failures.
Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes
#450Earlier quoted context omitted.
I doubt they have too much COBOL lock-in, since the article notes their datacenter opened in 2008. Here's the thing: A mainframe may have spare capacity, but you still have to call IBM to unlock it. In order to make a Z run in a cost-effective manner, you need to run at 90%+ utilization at all times - which is excellent for batch jobs that can be scheduled, but is difficult to achieve with on-demand loads. You're pay…
> a phone call to big blue is not automated. Cloud autoscaling is. Respectfully, the hell you say. Cloud 'autoscaling' is something that has to be tenderly maintained by software engineers, who expect to be paid salaries and benefits and so on. It's not like FedEx can just rsync their data into the cloud and have all their software run forever. Instead, they need the engineering team that manages their existing data…
This sounds like something they will solve in cloud 2.0