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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

#491

Post by kragen »

kasey_junk wrote: post #164
kragen wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, a cloud vendor is a company that has literally all of your company's data and a plethora of cloud services that are subtly incompatible with their competitor's offerings, and their machines make the millisecond-by-millisecond decisions about what your company does. They are in a position to calculate precisely how much you can afford to pay them without going bankrupt, and charge you $1 less. Oracle has aspired…

The exact same thing can be said about the IBM mainframes they are replacing. Which is a much older business model.

Yes, running your business on IBM mainframes is a very expensive mistake, for the same reasons; but even IBM mainframes don't have the degree of price-discrimination power that a cloud provider does.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#492

Post by kragen »

abirch wrote: post #446
themerone wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I feel like I could probably roll my own word processor this weekend.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#493

Post by kragen »

eikenberry wrote: post #444
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…

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.

Why be a management company on top of a delivery company? Or a finance company on top of a delivery company? Or an employer on top of a delivery company? Because if you outsource any of those functions 100%, your vendor owns the actual company.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#494

Post by appletrotter »

whatever1 wrote: post #211
mrep wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ever heard of the traveling salesman problem because that is worse than linear, it is factorial. Granted, that is probably overkill for most people and my team (Not FedEx) just does NxN so it is only quadratic but it is definitely not constant nor even linear.

Exactly because tsp variants are exponentially combinatorial we solve them with a strict time limit and use the best found solution. So for practical applications they are constant time.

> So for practical applications they are constant time.

So they should be able to handle all of this on a raspberry pi, if the size of the input has no effect on processing time.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#496

Post by mbesto »

nix23 wrote: post #223
jeffbee wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1000% this. HN loves to talk about Dropbox. I spent most of my (short, praise God) career at Dropbox diagnosing a fleet of dodgy database servers we bought from HPE. Turns out they were full of little flecks of metal inside. Thousands of em, full of iron filings. You think that kind of thing happens when you are an AWS customer? If you are sophisticated enough to engage an ODM, build your own facilities, and put hvac…

Why do you buy servers with metal flakes in it? No quality controll on your side?

Wait, are you saying that an org needs expertise to QC all of the the hardware they procure? How expensive is that? How easy it is to hire that type of QC?

Do you see how these costs all start to add up?

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#497

Post by Jistern »

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…

Your reasoning is faulty and very probably self-serving. More and more companies can and will outsource their infrastructure. IT guys hate this because it threatens their "paychecks."

The optimal amount of cloud services for an established company like FedEx is 100%, not merely with a "disaster recovery plan" but with live, 99.99% redundancy by which I mean two almost exact systems running nearly simultaneously (within a second or two of one another) on two completely different networks.

FedEx enjoys almost all of its competitive advantage from its physical network. IT is not core to its business.

Here's the problem... almost no company actually does disaster recovery and "parallel redundancy" properly because most C-level executives only pay lip service to it.

Therefore, the whole notion that disaster recovery and "parallel redundancy" don't work is predicated on the false notion that companies actually have proper disaster recovery and "parallel redundancy" in the first place.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#498

Post by Jistern »

cs702 wrote: post #36
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…

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…

No post body was provided.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#499

Post by mbesto »

masswerk wrote: post #94
cs702 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, I don't think the decision is that shortsighted in this case. It could work out pretty well for a decade or longer. IMHO FedEx is likely to have a good run before the costs and risks of this decision start outweighing its benefits.

However, when the situation starts to become unbearable, how long will it take to rebuild the infrastructure and source talent? Another decade? Adding the startup costs for any possible rebuild, you're apt for a substantial net loss. So you're probably going to shy away from such a reintegration, while losses accumulate further, until this becomes unsustainable, putting the entire corporation at risk. (The wise thing…

> how long will it take to rebuild the infrastructure and source talent?

How costly is it to maintain that level of talent? Do you think top server admin talent is screaming to work at FedEx or Amazon?

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#500

Post by mbesto »

jchook wrote: post #230

Interesting story as I recall Bank of America saving 5x that amount per year by doing the exact opposite move. https://www.businessinsider.com/bank-of-americas-350-million...

This is 100% reasonable and plausible. It's perfectly acceptable that one F500 company can see savings by using cloud and others see increased costs.
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