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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

#251

Post by unregistereddev »

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 paying based on compute available, not just compute used (unless I'm misremembering our contracts back in the day). Sure, the amount of available capacity can be changed, but a phone call to big blue is not automated. Cloud autoscaling is.

You're right that IBM mainframes are far more modern and cost effective than we assume. Sadly, they are still behind the curve of cloud hosting.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#252

Post by nathanielarmer »

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…

Today I learned that economies of scale and specialization are not things.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#253

Post by WFHRenaissance »

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…

Great concrete example of the principal-agent problem here.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#254

Post by nix23 »

jeffbee wrote: post #233
nix23 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Are you saying that part of the expected savings from going on-prem is that you will have to disassemble equipment bought from major OEMs and examine it for microscopic metal dust? That doesn't sound like it will save much money, honestly.

Are you saing you just buy some server unpack them and throw them into production.....oh man...the lost art of systemadmin, if your system is not stable (in testing) you for sure disassemble it, or send it back. How much money have you lost playing around with your unstable database? Was it more then test your servers for some weeks? Do you buy/build software and throw it into production without testing?

You can test your stuff and be still profitable henzer aws etc would make no money otherwise....you know they test their server much more (sometimes weeks/month)

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#255

Post by api »

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 but the round trip to/from the cloud can be a forcing function in a large bureaucratic company to dump a lot of ossified infrastructure and IT organizational baggage. When you re-localize you'll be building a new IT organization to do it and using new hardware.

Big organizations often do things that seem wasteful as a way of dumping organizational cruft.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#256

Post by kamaal »

tbrownaw wrote: post #218
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…

Someone, somewhere, has to actually buy the computers. "Only pay for what you use" isn't magic, whatever fraction actually gets used (across all customers) has to end up paying for the whole computer. Taxis are "only pay for what you use", but owning your own car is often cheaper (even if you only use it, what, 1/12 of the day?) and more convenient.

>>Someone, somewhere, has to actually buy the computers.

Exactly, so as long as it's not you, you should be fine.

Let AWS figure out how they wish to do it for you.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#257

Post by fennecfoxen »

vlovich123 wrote: post #205
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…

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 an…

> 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.

Effectively hiring, retaining, evaluating and rewarding competent staff is hard. Even at a big company the datacenter can be a really small world, which makes it hard for your best employees to grow. Things are especially hard when you don't have a tech brand to rely on for your recruiting, and the staff's expertise is far outside the company's core business, making it harder to evaluate who's good at anything.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#258

Post by knorker »

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…

You could make the same argument for companies that don't own their own buildings, their own land, or have vendors of any shape or form.

That is, all companies ever.

The opposite of what you're proposing is "do your core business".

Why would fedex be better at running computers than Azure is?

Why does FedEx use vans built by a car company? They should build their own vans. The tires should clearly be made from rubber that FedEx vulcanized themselves.

I've seen huge insurance companies outsource not just their hardware, but their ops too.

McDonalds may be in the real estate business (and not the burger business), but FedEx is not.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#259

Post by nix23 »

yobbo wrote: post #242
jeffbee wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying that part of the expected savings from going on-prem is that you will have to disassemble equipment bought from major OEMs and examine it for microscopic metal dust? That doesn't sound like it will save much money, honestly.

Did they pass typical memory/reliability tests and so on?

Maybe in the first day's they survive it, but the flakes are 99% from the fans/bearings, that's why you test servers at max load for at least 1 week and HD's for 2-4 weeks.

But i don't think they made even a initial load-/stresstest.

Unpack it, trow it into the rack, no checking of internal plug's just nothing...pretty sure about that.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#260

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]
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