Too bad it's not sooner, could use a flood of decent servers on the second hand market.
FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes
321–330 of 573 posts
Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes
#322This makes a lot of sense if you think through the angle that their core value prop does not come from the network/data latency optimization. It's not Netflix and Dropbox - this is FedEx. Their core business value proposition comes from logistics and being able to react to the information quickly, but extra millisecond latency is unlikely to make or break the business. In light of this, it's easier to outsource the n…
> through the angle that their core value prop
Surely this is just one ingredient to a successful company and there are myriad factors involved. The core business of Boeing isn't to make planes its to sell them.
Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes
#323Earlier 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…
Hetzner is about 10x cheaper than AWS, give or take.
I love Hetzner and send them money every month, but you do get what you pay for. I don't think I'd like to run FedEx off of Hetzner.
Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes
#324Along with the data,
They. Own. The. Data center(s).
Well, in some sense or another. They might not be completely paid for but you get the idea, there's got to be a certain amount of worthwhile assets that could be leveraged.
Too bad there's not any business executives who have any experience at making money from a data center itself.
Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes
#325From an managerial accounting perspective it makes sense. Reduce cost centers and focus on core competencies. But many things make more sense from a short-term, myopic, improve this quarter accounting sense that are actually bad ideas.
Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes
#326This makes a lot of sense if you think through the angle that their core value prop does not come from the network/data latency optimization. It's not Netflix and Dropbox - this is FedEx. Their core business value proposition comes from logistics and being able to react to the information quickly, but extra millisecond latency is unlikely to make or break the business. In light of this, it's easier to outsource the n…
> through the angle that their core value prop Surely this is just one ingredient to a successful company and there are myriad factors involved. The core business of Boeing isn't to make planes its to sell them.
That's the wrong analogy. In your example, the former is required for the latter. FedEx wants network stability and a data store, most likely, but the success of their business does not depend on them hosting their own infrastructure.
Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes
#327Earlier 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…
Other formulations of this I’ve heard are “movement doesn’t mean progress” and “fire and motion”, the latter offers by Joel Spolsky in one of his better blog entries.
Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes
#328Ultimately 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…
> Because what's their BATNA? Migrating from Azure to AWS when Microsoft doesn't want to let them?
As long as they have backups, yep, that's a quite possible alternative. And backups cost very little, and don't need to run flawlessly 24x7.
They will probably pay through their nose either way (backups or not, migrating or not), because that's how the cloud works. But well, that's for their bean-counters to count. As long as they have backups, it's not strategy defining or an existential risk.
(Anyway, nobody goes around talking about BATNA of the proprietary, rented mainframes. I wonder why.)
Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes
#329Earlier quoted context omitted.
The transfer of various liabilities is omitted from the above tweets, which is clearly worth something to some people.
What liabilities? Cloud operators are breached on a monthly basis and there are no repercussions.
What makes you think F500 companies don't get breached all the time?
Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes
#330Ultimately 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…
> 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 creating disruptions in the process.