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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

#471

Post by antisthenes »

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.

There are definitely countries and US States where the economics of solar don't work.

Luckily, it does work for most of the US, especially desert/arid areas.

> but I see fewer companies building collectors in places with cheap land and ample sun.

They are plentiful in Turkey and some southern EU countries like Greece/Croatia, I believe. Not sure about deployment in the US.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#472

Post by majormajor »

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…

So what's the moral of the story?

Do you think it's "don't change"? Cause that gives right up on progress anyway. So good luck on getting large shareholders to give you the reins with that message. They're looking for ROI, not the status quo - if you don't evolve, your competitor will, barring monopolies and such. And even there... Microsoft of today is much less dominant than the MS of 25 years ago, and arguably could be worth a lot more had they made better moves. If that's not a compelling example, maybe check out Sears...

Maybe most people in these positions know that change doesn't guarantee improvement, but they know that sitting still is the same as just waiting to be defeated. So maybe there's something less-than-stupid about these "short-sighted" "illusory" changes.

But maybe if you want to be a wise executive, the key is to recognize that change might not just fail to improve your position - it might actually actively harm it. So the good executive is the one who chooses to try to change things according to reasonable calculations about both potential upside benefit and downside risk...

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#473

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

whatever1 wrote: post #424
Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 tha…

I'm wondering if we're talking about different things.

If it takes 1 second of CPU time to process the path for 1 package, then it will take 1 million seconds of CPU time to path find 1 million packages. You can add more CPUs to run multiple path finds in parallel (ie, use 4 CPUs to cut the wall time to 250,000 seconds), but there's still 1 million core-seconds being spent.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#474

Post by pjdesno »

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've got some experience with a big academic data center - >1 acre floor space, >10MW, ~$100M construction cost. I've also worked for commercial companies of various sizes.

If your compute installation is big enough that payroll is a small fraction of the operating cost, then it's way cheaper than cloud. (that payroll has to include people who actually know how to build and run a huge compute installation)

The problem is that people come in integer units, you need a bunch of them to cover a bunch of different areas of expertise, and the particular ones you need are expensive. If you've got $1M worth of computers, you're almost certainly better off scrapping them and going to cloud, although the folks you're currently paying to run them might disagree. If you have $100M+ worth of machines it's a whole different ballgame; I'm not sure where the exact crossover is.

Note - that's assuming a single data center, and that you're big enough to build your own data center instead of renting colo space. If you need your machines to be geographically dispersed, you'll need to be even bigger before it's cheaper than cloud, and I'm not sure whether you'll ever hit crossover if you're renting colo space.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#475

Post by georgeecollins »

cupofpython wrote: post #280
bluGill wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

8-10 years is as long as senior executives last, if they don't make a big change then thee is no way to take credit for their vision. Even if the company had a "perfect" org chart (as if such a thing is possible), they need to make changes otherwise someone will say that they old org chart is the cause of success and they as a leader were not worth anything. I don't know if the above fear would actually play out, nob…

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…

I would compare this to asking a dev team to support a big code base without embarking on a major redesign or re-engineering.

It's hard to keep a good (confident, ambitious) team from re-engineering. All the same dynamics apply: In your mind the disadvantages of change are small because you don't know them, but the advantages are large because you planned them. Making change gives you more control over your fate because you are executing your own plan as opposed to staying the course. Finally, how do you keep people motivated to show up every morning if you don't have a vision for change in the future?

I don't think its that different for managers and engineers. There's a lot pushing people to try something, even if the objective odds of success aren't great.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#476

Post by julianozen »

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?

Seasonal demand

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#477

Post by MisterBastahrd »

IMSAI8080 wrote: post #289
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…

The other thing is nVidia try and sell GPUs with similar performance at two very different prices. One price for data centres and a quite different price to kids. If you do the job yourself you can often get away with using the much cheaper gamer grade cards for AI work (unless you need a lot of VRAM), whereas such as AWS can't do that and are required by nVidia to use the considerably more expensive cards. If your w…

A lot of that is just good old fashioned marketing.

Here's the list of ingredients for Excedrin Migraine:

Active Ingredients: Acetaminophen - 250 mg (Pain reliever), Aspirin (NSAID) - 250 mg (Pain reliever), Caffeine - 65 mg (Pain reliever aid) Inactive Ingredients: benzoic acid, carnauba wax, FD&C blue #1, hydroxypropylcellulose, hypromellose, light mineral oil, microcrystalline cellulose, polysorbate 20, povidone, propylene glycol, simethicone emulsion, sorbitan monolaurate, stearic acid, titanium dioxide

This is the list of symptoms that Excedrin Migraine claims to treat:

- migraines

And now here's the ingredients for Excedrin Extra Strength:

Active Ingredients: Acetaminophen - 250 mg, Aspirin (NSAID) - 250 mg, Caffeine - 65 mg Inactive Ingredients: benzoic acid, carnauba wax, FD&C blue #1, hydroxypropylcellulose, hypromellose, light mineral oil, microcrystalline cellulose, polysorbate 20, povidone, propylene glycol, simethicone emulsion, sorbitan monolaurate, stearic acid, titanium dioxide

This is the list of symptoms that Excedrin Extra Strength claims to treat:

- headache - toothache - a cold - arthritis - premenstrual & menstraul cramps - muscular aches

And while SOME places have normalized the prices between the two, they can be often found on shelves at two different price points.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#478

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#479

Post by novok »

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…

Yes, just like leasing office buildings instead of buying them causes companies to give all of their profits to real estate companies. Or using dell windows laptops. /s

If AWS et all get too greedy, competitors will pop up saying 'your margin is my opportunity' and market competition happens for something that is a commodity, and becoming more so as time goes on.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#480

Post by kragen »

chunk_waffle wrote: post #402
dehrmann wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you spend US$6000 on panels and batteries, your electricity bill is US$300/month, and the outages and power lines cost you nothing, then your payback time for the off-grid solar system would seem to be 20 months, under two years, not 10 years. The outages and power lines would seem to shorten the payback time further, not lengthen it. Without disparaging the feel-good control thing, which I think is reasonable and important, I feel like I must be misunderstanding something about your explanation.
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