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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

#521

Post by dx034 »

spookthesunset wrote: post #375
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…

> benefit from the ability to rapidly scale on cloud platforms Big companies need this too. Some team wants to spin up some new service to try out some idea? In cloud-land they push a button. In "rack & stack" land they have to wait for Ops to purchase the hardware and provision it. Cloud makes it cheap and easy to try out new stuff.

As any cloud, you should always have spare capacity on-prem. Spinning up a VM on-prem doesn't have to be slower than in the Cloud. At this scale, you're just your own cloud provider.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#522

Post by dx034 »

dehrmann wrote: post #315
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 disagree. This isn't FedEx's core competency or a differentiator for them. They're also not at a scale where it could make sense to colocate or build their own DCs. Fiddling with low-level tech infra would just be a distraction. Now, they might find that software is a differentiator for them, but that's different.

For a logistics company, the IT system is the differentiator. Reliably routing and tracking packages to maximize utilization of trucks and planes allows them to be cheaper and faster. That all depends on both hardware and software. So I'd definitely think that running their own systems should be a given.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#523

Post by dx034 »

jollybean wrote: post #270
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…

They are doing the rational thing and there is no going back. HNers need to get their heads around this: the economies of the could represent a fundamental, secular shift. Imagine if Fedex designed and made their own delivery vehicles. Then they 'outsourced' that to Ford/GM. You might say 'look at Ford's amazing margins, look at the money being left on the table' - but in reality, it's still more cost effective to 'b…

Fedex isn't building their own vehicles, same as they wouldn't build their own servers. But going cloud is more like outsourcing all transport activities to other logistics companies. No one says they have to do every part of DC ops themselves, but outsourcing everything and using proprietary products makes them very vulnerable.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#524

Post by dx034 »

unregistereddev wrote: post #251
filereaper wrote: post #189

Its weird to have companies say they're moving from Mainframes to the Cloud. The Mainframe is a sort of cloud, each one has usually double the spare capacity and you call IBM to unlock it. The cost of running a Mainframe is measured in terms of MIPS based on amount of compute used and there's compute reserved for offloading things like JITs (zAAPS). Essentially a version of cloud compute costs. I can understand if yo…

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…

I'm confused about the first data center in 2008. Surely they had data centers before that, or were they outsourced before? Automatic routing of deliveries has been the standard for many decades, I'm sure the code on their mainframes is much older than just 14 years.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#525

Post by Nextgrid »

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…

> fibers, cooling issues, physical security

All of that can be handled by your colocation facility. In most cases you won't ever reach the scale where building your own DC makes sense.

> Then you still need to pay VMWare for a decent virtualization platform

Should still be cheaper than paying the AWS premium including for bandwidth, not to mention that you don't always need virtualization. If all you need the bare-metal for is a handful of machines to do a very specific task that's too expensive on AWS then running directly on the metal is an option (and leave on AWS the stuff that does require the convenience of virtualization).

> I believe companies selling bare metal as a service are a happy compromise of cost and convenience, though.

Agreed. Most companies shouldn't ever deal with hardware directly - just rent it from a provider and let them do the maintenance.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#526

Post by dx034 »

dan_quixote wrote: post #397
filereaper wrote: post #189

Its weird to have companies say they're moving from Mainframes to the Cloud. The Mainframe is a sort of cloud, each one has usually double the spare capacity and you call IBM to unlock it. The cost of running a Mainframe is measured in terms of MIPS based on amount of compute used and there's compute reserved for offloading things like JITs (zAAPS). Essentially a version of cloud compute costs. I can understand if yo…

> Its weird to have companies say they're moving from Mainframes to the Cloud. Ever work for a company with their own datacenters that were NOT cutting edge? The work to provision resources can be so painful that it severely inhibits prototyping. Being able to spin up resources in seconds with some API calls is very valuable.

No one says you can't have both. An on-prem data center for reliable workloads and cloud to try out new stuff and products or to get short-term capacity. But in the end, 95%+ of servers in your data center will run 24/7 and for years on the same software. No need to outsource that.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#527

Post by Nextgrid »

marcosdumay wrote: post #337
tomc1985 wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't enjoy it then what were you doing working at a datacenter? I enjoyed server admin, "back in the day", when your servers were pets and not cattle. But of course we have to make tech just as expendable as our workers, business school demands it! What if your pet server gets hit by a digital bus?!

Pet server classes is a much nicer concept anyway. I never liked the instance based personalization. Creating a machine, defining its class, and seeing it become a machine of its class is magical. Of course, the newest idea is for creating and destroying machines automatically... that outside of the could is quite pointless but people want it anyway. I imagine seeing all that orchestration working must be even nicer…

One argument for "cattle" servers on bare-metal is security. Being able to reset the machine to a clean, known-good state would clear any leftovers including potential malware. Having machines provisioned from images that include everything they need to run also means you don't even need to grant anyone root access (which you'd otherwise need to be able to audit so they don't leave anything malicious in there).

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#528

Post by dx034 »

sithadmin wrote: post #435

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…

They have up to three racks for a flight simulator? I would've never thought they're that complex. Do they need that much computing power or is it other devices that are needed?

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#529

Post by dx034 »

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...

That's how you do it. You don't stick with on-prem but just build your own cloud. At that size, AWS won't really buy hardware much cheaper than you. And while you can't build every cloud product that AWS has, the most popular ones are open source anyway.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#530

Post by dx034 »

Someone1234 wrote: post #153
TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #136

I've seen two mainframe "replacements" fail to either retire the mainframe, OR produce an alternative system which people like. Has any Fortune 500 company successfully "retired" their mainframe?

I've seen it. It was essentially four steps: - Build middleware (REST API endpoint) in front of the mainframe that was 1:1 mainframe functions. It initially does nothing except auth and routing. - Re-write/migrate all other software from using the mainframe directly to using the new middleware. - Work to further restrict anything directly connecting to the mainframe aside from the middleware, including staff's termin…

> The hardest part about the above isn't the tech, it is the internal norms that you're fighting against (e.g. staff have had terminal access for tens of years, and know the commands to get their work done by memory).

I have sympathy for those people. Not a fan of AS/400, but working in those terminals is incredibly fast once you know all shortcuts. Modern GUIs, especially using all those fancy frameworks, are much slower. If the alternative to the terminal is a new web application, it's extremely likely that it'll be harder to work with.

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