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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

#201

Post by jeffbee »

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…

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 and electricians on 24-hour payroll, go on-prem. Otherwise, cloud all the way.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#202

Post by tablespoon »

lephty wrote: post #193
B1FF_PSUVM wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Change gives the illusion of progress". That itself is based on the belief that (historical) progress is an improvement. Mostly true over the last few centuries - aspirin is nice - except for those occasions where it was mass murder.

First "pain mixing machines," and now "asp(i)rin is nice."

So? People can't spell and typos are a common phenomena.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#203

Post by amelius »

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, it sounds like they are about to head down the same road as many large firms who sold all their real estate because short-term investors said it was a good idea.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#204

Post by WJW »

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…

Fedex does not create their own electricity or fuel either, yet without those they have no going concern. Yet they choose to acquire those services on the open market because it is cheaper, even though they do make themselves more dependent on the supplier. In the end, full self-sufficiency is just not viable for large companies in a highly specialized economy.

In this case, if a cloud provider gets too monopolistic then the BATNA for fedex is to re-hire (or train) enough sysadmins to run their own systems again. That puts an upper limit to how much a cloud provider can charge for their services, in addition the competition between Azure/AWS/GCP will also keep prices somewhat down. The cloud providers know this and will price accordingly.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#205

Post by vlovich123 »

IHLayman wrote: post #150
pid-1 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

Re data, I think egress rates are going to start disappearing over the next few years.

The part that’s always missing with these rent vs buy analyses on HN for some reason is that it’s totally ignoring the opex cost of operating your own hardware which is going to be non 0. Sure, it won’t be quite as expensive (no profit margin) but it’s not an order of magnitude. Additionally, most companies don’t run the HW 24/7 and, if they do, it’s not a level of people they want to hire to support said operations. Not just running it, but you have to invest and grow something that’s not a core competency to get economies of multiple teams loading up the HW.

If the next revolution in cloud comes in to cause companies to onsite the HW again, it’ll look like making it super easy to take spare compute and spare storage from existing companies and resell it on an open market in an easy way. Even still, I think the operational challenges of keeping all that up and running and being utilized at as close to 100% as possible and not focusing on your core business problem will be difficult because you won’t be able to compete with engineering companies that have a core competency in that space.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#206

Post by jandrewrogers »

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…

There are a few different ways to run a data center, a subset of which are much less expensive than the cloud but require a level of competency that some organizations will never have. It can also be relatively pain-free when done well. Some workloads are inherently inefficient in the cloud because of the architecture.

Data center ops is ultimately a supply chain management problem, but most people don't treat it as such. That was my primary learning from doing data center ops at a few different companies. If you get the supply chain management right, and are technically competent, there can be a lot to recommend running your own data centers.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#207

Post by thr0wawayf00 »

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.…

> The market of available mainframe operators has been drying up for decades.

Just like many other industries, the market for mainframe operators that want to earn less than technologists in modern stacks has been drying up. A lot of mainframe operators refuse to bring their pay scales in line with what developers in modern stacks are earning. Why take a pay cut to go work on a 40 year-old system when you can work on modern stuff with more money?

They keep the pay low and complain about a labor shortage to deflect from the fact that they're simply choosing to ignore market forces.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#209

Post by HPsquared »

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…

It sounds a bit like the bodybuilding method of bulking and cutting.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#210

Post by HPsquared »

adwn wrote: post #126
goindeep wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> the pain mixing machines That sounds ... dystopian.

The pain is mixed, then applied in the pain booth.
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