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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

#541

Post by 29083011397778 »

yibg wrote: post #434
29083011397778 wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

All I can come up with is "Because economies of scale". I work for a transportation company, but we employ plumbers, carpenters, electricians, elevator repairmen, and many more that I'm not aware of, because we have enough locations / work to justify them. The pizza place has enough work to justify hiring a fleet of drivers, Amazon ships enough crap to justify having their own trucks (when they can't sucker another company into taking the unprofitable routes).

Similarly, Google doesn't ship enough stuff worldwide to justify drivers, insurance, trucks, jets, etc. - Fedex has the size and scale to make every package a couple cents cheaper, so it's just not worth it for Google.

The only other argument I can think of is the challenge of keeping every plate spinning, in good times and in bad. This is where your point of having a cost to take on something outside your core business comes in, but we seem to be in an era of mega-corporations - I'd expect lots of companies to snake tendrils into whatever will save them a fraction of a cent every time they have to do something.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#542

Post by treesknees »

kamaal wrote: post #238
treesknees wrote: post #179

I wonder how much of this is motivated by the lack of staff. The market of available mainframe operators has been drying up for decades. When your entire business depends on a technology nobody is willing to learn or go to school to understand, that creates a problem. Also, from my understanding, it can take a tremendous number of distributed x86 systems to supplement the scale, speed and reliability of a mainframe.…

Would be curious to learn the specs of current day mainframes, and cost. What sort of work is typically done on such machines these days.

Disclaimer: I have not worked directly on mainframes themselves.

They've been doing the same type of work for decades. Batch processing of records and transactions (payroll, insurance, banking, airline booking, etc.) IBM releases new mainframe models all the time, and typically companies will lease them and upgrade every few years.

When I worked at an insurance company, the mainframes were the core of their financials. They had around 8 of them in an active/standby DR site. The machines could do instruction-level error checking, meaning even a weird processor failure/error wouldn't impact the end transaction. Basically if you want to guarantee accurate handling of your money, you use a mainframe.

One common thing to see nowadays is the mainframe becomes abstracted by some other layer of API, such as a rest API. This has reduced the need somewhat for mainframe operators, but in the end you're still interacting with some COBOL that was written 30 years ago and somebody needs to understand it and the hardware. And the hardware is so different from traditional servers, you can't just pick it up and wing it. You really need someone who knows what they're doing.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#543

Post by stjohnswarts »

dx034 wrote: post #534
stjohnswarts wrote: post #441

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...

Or the amazon cloud becomes the new IBM mainframe and in 20 years they all work on getting off it, but can't because they are so deeply integrated.

it would be hilarious if IBM is the immortal one and eventually buy out a limping AWS and keep the software running for the next N decades.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#544

Post by mbesto »

nix23 wrote: post #518
mbesto wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I procure a fleet of cars I expect none of them to be faulty...how about you?

>I expect none of them to be faulty So you don't even test the car's, you just expect that the tire pressure is correct, tank is full? Expect that something "just" works is exactly why pilots have checklist's. Expectations are the main point for disappointments, you would never do that with software right?

> you would never do that with software right?

Hilarious you used this as an analogy since software development shops are notorious for cutting corners when it comes to QA.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#545

Post by sithadmin »

dx034 wrote: post #528
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?

2/3rd's ish compute, 1/3 other stuff from what I've seen. A good chunk of the compute are appliance-type boxes supporting simulation of particular embedded systems in a traditional environment. Most of the complexity comes from integration of these misc accessory systems.

In general aside from the boxes handling the graphics projection, most of the 'compute' is idle a lot of the time, even when the simulator is running. There's usually a big burst of work to prep and load the simulation into the simulator, then minimal (but very latency sensitive) chatter back and forth between the various simulator components and the backend compute as the simulation runs.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#546

Post by earthboundkid »

BrainVirus wrote: post #330
earthboundkid wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because what's their BATNA? Migrating from Azure to AWS when Microsoft doesn't want to let them? Uh yes, exactly? Clouds give small customers the first hit free as a loss leader. With very large customers, clouds have to be price competitive because if you're at a large scale, it is totally worth spending millions of dollars for a 5 year plan to change clouds. The people who get screwed are the medium to large cust…

>With very large customers, clouds have to be price competitive because if you're at a large scale, it is totally worth spending millions of dollars for a 5 year plan to change clouds. You've literally just explained why a large company would be perfectly willing to be overcharged by a cloud provider in order of millions of dollars. They would have to pay that for migration anyway and there is always a risk of creati…

My model is that changing clouds has a taxi-like fee structure: there's a base cost and a percentage cost. Larger firms can just swallow the base cost. Your model seems to be that the percentage cost goes up as the firm gets larger, which I don't think is correct.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#547

Post by dredmorbius »

iso1631 wrote: post #276
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…

They don't run their own electric companies, and often don't even own their own buildings, both of those are essential. I suspect they lease their trucks and planes too. If they're building it on AWS only kit and locking in, then they open themselves to risk. If they build it on standard VMs running on AWS, Azure, Digital Ocean, then they can shop around at contract renewal time, just like they can with Mercedes vs F…

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31995276

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#548

Post by cbozeman »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #186
mbesto wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> rent all information infrastructure Most of them were renting most of the infra anyway: - Co-location (physical space rented) - Managed service to keep the lights on (power, back-up generators) - Leased hardware that gets replaced every 3 years - Managed service for switch, firewall, etc. monitoring - ISP, back-up generators, etc. > but that will likely be many, many years down the road They're going to explain to…

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…

I feel like everyone in this discussion is missing the forest for the trees, especially given the way most public company executives think and operate, which is quarterly.

The problem with building out a new state-of-the-art datacenter - or several of them - is the enormous capital expenditure you've just put on your company's books, not to mention the operating expenditure of all the people that will be required to run it. Yes, it's true that as time goes on, you can claim some tax advantages in the form of depreciation, etc. on some components of this new huge outlay, but at the end of the day, when the company misses quarterly or yearly expectations from Wall Street and the stock price takes a 10% hit, the "blame" gets squarely laid at your feet - you are, after all, "the problem". You spent a shitload of money provisioning future resources for the company's (expected) growth.

Meanwhile, in Cloud Cuckoo-Cuckoo Land, your rival has migrated all or nearly all existing infrastructure to the cloud, thus including a significant op-ex, but not nearly as large as the enormous cap-ex you've just incurred. They're hailed as a hero. A goddamned visionary! Look at all that money they're going to save the company! Nevermind the fact that they explicitly instructed the IT department's head to provision only the necessary resources for current operations, after all, the "promise" of the cloud is that you can just spin up whatever you need in a few minutes, anyway. And besides, the cloud deployment of all the company's servers and the necessary expansion won't incur a significant turning of heads until long after our visionary executive has jumped ship to another company for more pay, a corner office, and a better stock compensation package. Best of all, he say that he saved the company $XX millions of dollars over your plan, and it can be said legitimately, even though it is, of course, inaccurate.

If you're huge, it's never cheaper to farm out the administration of your critical infrastructure to qualified experts. But because of the dominance of the Quarterly Report Cycle in modern business, this gets swept off by the wayside as "outdated thinking".

I say this, by the way, as an IT professional building out cloud solutions for companies. For a lot of small-to-medium sized businesses, and startups especially, the cloud makes sense. If someone at Federal Express thinks the cloud makes sense, they're looking out for themselves, not the company.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#550

Post by arghwhat »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #106
pclmulqdq wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FedEx essentially does make their own trucks - they buy from white box suppliers who have very narrow margins. Ships are similar. Planes probably have slightly higher margins, but they still will buy used. Getting computers from the cloud companies is very different: most cloud products (aside from server rentals) are not in competitive markets.

I would be surprised if FedEx or UPS or any last mile delivery company owned any ocean going ships.

UPS only ships by ground and air, so yes it would be rather surprising.

Fast delivery couriers do not ship by sea.

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