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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

#291

Post by adamc »

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…

This is one of the things bad about Wall Street: Short-term decision-making. Everybody cares what happens to stock prices in the near-term, rather than 10 years out.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#292

Post by citizenpaul »

alexvoda wrote: post #283
menzoic wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Renting your information infrastructure is a great way to reduce startup costs, but down the road, that information infrastructure runs your company. Trying to outsource it is like trying to outsource upper management. This isn't a one size fits all thing. For a company like FedEx I don't see the advantage of owning their own data centers. They just don't have the scaling challenges that would require that. Data cen…

Difference being that FedEx pays 0 $/km for the roads, but the $/GB and $/GHz will be at the mercy of their cloud provider.

> pays 0 $/km for the roads,

That is really not true at least in the USA. There are all kinds of taxes and fees for using the roads with large trucks. Have you ever seen the weigh stations on the sides of the highway in the US? Those are there to fine the trucks for what they are carrying if it is beyond what is allowed among other things. You said km though so you probably are not in the US.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#293

Post by mbesto »

tinco wrote: post #184
mbesto wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's not a company in the world that spends more than $1m annually on cloud costs that has saved money by doing so. You don't go to the cloud to save money, you go to the cloud to reduce technological risk. I don't know why I have to explain this every time "data center vs cloud" discussions come up, but if you reduce risks, then you are in effect saving money.

There are other ways of reducing risks. You only save money if it's the most efficient way of reducing risks and your risks are purely convertible into cash. I'm quite sure if you take managing your IT infrastructure as seriously as you take your core business, you can definitely save tons of money by handrolling your infrastructure. There's also a big difference between doing so 10 years ago versus now, with all the…

> I'm quite sure if you take managing your IT infrastructure as seriously as you take your core business

Try telling a company like Catepillar who manufactures excavating tools to "take IT as seriously as you do making tools"?

> with all the enterprise grade open source solutions to infrastructure challenges

You mean like OpenStack? Have you ever been in a large IT org (non tech company...like a distributing/manufacturing company) that has tried to implement it? and then maintain it? Oof...

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#294

Post by bradfa »

fsociety wrote: post #231

The thing I see missing in the comments is that sourcing hardware over the past few years has been incredibly difficult. It will get better, yes, but that may have been the last straw to convince them to switch.

Past few years? Maybe the past 18 months it's been slightly more difficult but even at the beginning of COVID it wasn't hard to source most anything. And even during these more recent supply-constrained times, you can still source hardware it just might take a little longer for delivery or you might pay a bit more than you did before.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#295

Post by spaetzleesser »

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…

That’s definitely how the IT department at my company works (I bet a lot of other roles too). Every few years a new exec comes in, sets a new strategy, claims tons of savings, creates “excellence” initiatives (everything that has “excellence” in its name triggers my BS detector). This lasts for a few years until the next guy comes in and goes through the same process but different direction.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#297

Post by Spivak »

bob1029 wrote: post #285
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…

> Or is everyone here caught up in the "Mainframe old" falsehood. It's probably this. I've spent time trying to advocate for the benefits of these systems, but its like shooting a super soaker into the sun.

I think it’s also both the people making the tech decisions and the people implementing them simply don’t want to work on mainframes. I would 100% of the time prefer to work with an on-prem dc or colo using commodity hardware and OSS to mange it.

I get my pick of a billion different hardware vendors, they’re all interchangeable and interoperable, every problem I can possibly dream up has been solved a hundred times before. The skills are commonplace and transferable so hiring doesn’t mean convincing some poor desperate grad to get trained in the company script, hires will actually want the skills, and you can find senior people.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#298

Post by jjoonathan »

sjtgraham wrote: post #217
HPsquared wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Bodybuilders make progress though :)

Isn't there a ceiling? Or if we lived as long as those turtles, would you go to the gym and see spheres of muscle?

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#299

Post by epberry »

Surprising to see a company claim massive cost savings for moving _off_ the cloud.

But perhaps they're talking about engineering velocity, reliability, etc. Of course everyone knows Dropbox's story with this: https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/manage/dropbox-s-reverse...

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#300

Post by citizenpaul »

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…

>"Change gives the illusion of progress".

This is one of the biggest reasons many jobs are so miserable. You want to be in the job at the beginning of the"invest" decision. Unfortunately most people get little say in when they join because the information about this is kept internally to the company.

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