FedEx To Close Data Centers, Retire All Mainframes By 2024, Saving $400 Million (datacenterdynamics.com) 112
FedEx is to close its data centers and retire all of its remaining mainframes within the next two years. Speaking during the FedEx investor day, FedEx CIO Rob Carter said the company is aiming for a "zero data center, zero mainframe" environment based in the cloud, which will result in $400 million in savings annually. From a report: "We've been working across this decade to streamline and simplify our technology and systems," he said. "We've shifted to cloud...we've been eliminating monolithic applications one after the other after the other...we're moving to a zero data center, zero mainframe environment that's more flexible, secure, and cost-effective. Within the next two years we'll close the last few remaining data centers that we have, we'll eliminate the final 20 percent of the mainframe footprint, and we'll move the remaining applications to cloud-native structures that allow them to be flexibly deployed and used in the marketplace and business. While we're doing this, we'll achieve $400 million of annual savings."
More secure? (Score:5, Interesting)
I've not heard the words "the cloud!" and "more secure" used together, unless it is in a joke.
While this may save 400M, I wonder what the cost is to ramp up all the new stuff...
Re: More secure? (Score:5, Insightful)
lol no (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:lol no (Score:5, Interesting)
Ah yes The Cloud the magical place known as somebody else's computer. You know the place that never goes down or is subject to third party fuckups. https://techmonitor.ai/technol... [techmonitor.ai]
IBM is expensive yes but it just works and will continue to work for years.
Yeah let's dump all that old COBOL code and replace it with something else. How about python2! That should be long supported, right?
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
This is FedEx we're talking about. They suddenly can't scan or route parcels on a daily basis as is, it seems; may as well save the $400M and deliver the same garbage service.
It might even improve if they only can't track things once a week.
Re: (Score:2)
Yep. Fedex was $84B in revenue last year. this is less than a half percent of that. Maybe there are using this to renegotiate with IBM...
Re: More secure? (Score:5, Informative)
Re: More secure? (Score:5, Insightful)
i need to work for a larger company, because until now it always is more expensive overall.
Re: More secure? (Score:5, Interesting)
That's not universally true, in fact, I'd say for large companies it makes less sense unless they negotiate insane off sheet pricing. The "We'll save all this money on data centers, headcount and hardware!" always becomes "Why have our monthly IT expenditures become astronomical?". Fixed and one time budgets have less political friction than variable monthly bills. When hard times come and the CIO is looking for savings, that multi-million $ AWS / Azure monthly cheque is going to be in their crosshairs, when the sunken no-check-to-write data center depreciation deduction never would. If you're a small company, then AWS is undoubtedly cheaper than your own DC or even most co-hosting.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
H A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A!
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
But in the meantime, they'll try to defer their Opex as much as possible.
By going into debt with their cloud providers, they'll be able to bump up the bonuses of their executives.
Re: (Score:2)
It's going to "save" them $400 million... in Capex. By spending the money as Opex.
You can directly deduce OPEX from taxes. Doing that with CAPEX is a tad harder.
Re: (Score:2)
Depreciation is a thing.
Re:More secure? (Score:5, Interesting)
FedEx CIO Rob Carter said the company is aiming for a "zero data center, zero mainframe" environment based in the cloud
Apparently, Mr. Carter doesn't understand that "the cloud" **IS** a data center. It's just someone else's data center.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
FedEx CIO Rob Carter said the company is aiming for a "zero data center, zero mainframe" environment based in the cloud
Apparently, Mr. Carter doesn't understand that "the cloud" **IS** a data center. It's just someone else's data center.
I'm sure Mr. Carter understands that perfectly well, and also understands that data centers benefit from economies of scale, and the big cloud providers have mind-boggling scale. Even with their profit margin, they can almost always significantly undercut the cost of self-service data center operations.
Re: (Score:2)
Cloud can indeed be more secure, especially for small firms, but I'd hope that wouldn't be true for a company like FedEx.
Re:More secure? (Score:4, Interesting)
https://www.cablinginstall.com... [cablinginstall.com]
Also, they are already a customer of Oracle and Azure.
Someone at FedEx is looking to get a promotion by conjuring up $400 Million in phony "savings"
Re:More secure? (Score:5, Insightful)
I've not heard the words "the cloud!" and "more secure" used together, unless it is in a joke.
While this may save 400M, I wonder what the cost is to ramp up all the new stuff...
Well going from an old system to a new system probably is more secure.
As for the security of the cloud overall, you're basically trading one class of vulnerabilities for another.
It's true you're introducing the possibility of misconfiguration on your cloud settings, and of malfeasance or simple screwup by the cloud provider. But you're also getting the infrastructure managed by an IT staff much larger and better resourced than anything you can manage.
I looked around for cloud security incidents and found some articles about folks misconfiguring their AWS buckets [makeuseof.com] and a list of breaches that have nothing to do with the cloud [arcserve.com] but not much else.
I can see why some very paranoid folks like pipeline companies who might be the target of state actors would stay off the cloud, and maybe FedEx falls into that category, but I don't see any evidence of the cloud being less secure.
Re: (Score:3)
| Well going from an old system to a new system probably is more secure.
When's the last time you heard of someone clicking on a link and infecting the company mainframe(s)? ;)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
The cloud usually is more secure. Security experts are expensive, and so is a team of people to monitor for security incidents and keep every server up to date.
Cloud providers have all that and more. While it doesn't mean the client can completely ignore security, it does usually mean it's better than if they did it themselves.
How often do we hear about yet another data leak, yet another ransomware attack. Companies are terrible at doing their own security.
Re:More secure? (Score:5, Interesting)
The cloud provider's security people aren't going to be helping you much. They only work on the provider's back end.
You can still deploy vulnerable stuff into your public cloud and be just as screwed as if it was your own data center. You still need your own security people to handle your own stuff, and if you're in public cloud, their hands are generally tied in a lot of ways, and it's even more expensive if possible at all.
We've been utterly unable to duplicate the level of security we have in our own data centers in AWS or Azure at any cost. It's getting better, but the capabilities just aren't there yet. The stuff that gets close, like VMC/NSX with Palo Alto service insertion is so expensive that no one can actually afford to do it at any reasonable scale.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I think you missed the point. Sure, your code can be vulnerable. But at least the cloud service provider takes care of the OS and the apps. When a critical flaw is discovered in MySQL or systemd, they will get it patched and deployed faster than most people running their own servers. In fact Google and Amazon and Microsoft engineers are often the ones who find the bugs and get them fixed before they are made public.
Re: More secure? (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
I've not heard the words "the cloud!" and "more secure" used together, unless it is in a joke.
While this may save 400M, I wonder what the cost is to ramp up all the new stuff...
If this is done correctly, the extra security will not come from "the cloud", but rather from replacing code writen in the 70's (remember FedEx was founded in 1971) running in mainframes with code written in more modern languages, with more modern techniques, and taking into account things that did not exist in the 70's like the modern internet (remember that "the modern internet" started in 1 Jan 1984 with "the great switchover" to IPv4 + TCP)
Re: (Score:2)
Yes. "The cloud" can be more secure than on-premise systems for a number of reasons:
- Money. Most in-house IT shops, even for big companies, don't spend enough on security. They might hire "a" security analyst, but the backlog of improvements is years long. AWS and Azure spend millions on security, because it is their very lifeblood. Without it, no one would be willing to host sensitive data in the cloud, and it certainly wouldn't meet regulatory requirements.
- Lack of access. If you set up a headless data
Re: (Score:3)
I absolutely agree that the cloud can be more secure with a couple of caveats. First you have to setup guardrails at the organizational level and you have to use Infrastructure as Code (IaC).
Guardrails are so important, even a simple one of RDP, ssh, remote access, etc. be denied by default. Then requiring IaC, in my case it's Terraform and GitLab. If a project needs remote access they have to put it into the .tf and request it be merged. Multiple groups have to review and approve the merge request (MR)
Re: (Score:2)
You make some excellent points. The OpEx vs. CapEx is more important than it might seem. If your company is so focused on the tax implications of CapEx vs. OpEx that they refuse to "do it right," they are asking for trouble no matter what method they use to stand up their infrastructure.
Re: (Score:2)
What does "physical possession" even mean these days? In the old days, you would back up your systems onto tape, and store the tapes offsite somewhere, probably in a space owned by...somebody else. Did you have physical possession then? Could the owner of the property not lock you out if they so chose? Wasn't it always wise to spread out your backups in different locations? How is that different from today's cloud world?
If you're not backing up your CLOUD systems in such a way that you don't have access sho
Re: (Score:2)
And that's what backup solutions are for. There's many ways to accomplish this without being "locked into cloud services" from a dumb script that acts as a SQL client and does table dumps to a file, there's read-replica functionality, and there's more advanced techniques such as publishing specific things you care about to a message queue (Kafka or similar) which can either also be in the cloud, a different cloud, or back in an on-prem closet; where it can then be transformed (or not) and ingested by anyth
There is no cloud... (Score:1)
...there are only other peoples computers.
Placing all of your eggs in another persons basket doesn't seem like a good idea, but I could be wrong.
Re: (Score:3)
Putting all your eggs in your own basket versus playing a market of several competitors against each other for a very lucrative contract from your large business.
Re: (Score:2)
Don't look now (or do) but the delivery vans are already owned and operated by 3rd party contractors.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
No it doesn't. But it often is. Thanks for ignoring reality.
Re: There is no cloud... (Score:3)
Indeed. And it is just another basket.
Re: (Score:2)
Perhaps the basket is handled by people who are more competent because they are specialized to handle eggs?
Not saying that this has to be the case, but especially compared to smaller organizations, I find this rather likely to be the case.
Re: (Score:2)
Exactly this. How many companies have NO one whose job is specifically to manage infrastructure security improvements. It takes a fairly large organization to decide this is important enough to pay one person a full-time salary. Smaller organizations just assume that the IT support people are taking care of it.
Re: (Score:2)
We're talking about FedEx. That's also not a very competent company at even delivering packages on time, and unbroken. And that's their core service. Why would you think that they would be better than a cloud hosting company at running datacenters and information services?
Re: (Score:2)
And other people's computers are probably a better bet than your own.
Speaking of eggs, there are people all over that decide to raise chickens to get their own fresh eggs. That's nice, but do these random people actually know about proper cleanliness and how to avoid e-coli contamination? Do they pasteurize their eggs for safety? Probably not. For those kinds of measures, we rely on specialists, people who run chicken farms that can be monitored and regulated.
Personally, I'm less worried about eating a mass
Re: (Score:2)
Well, I know that pasteurizing an egg cooks it. Perhaps you were thinking of a bleach rinse.
I never sold my eggs, but between consuming them myself and handing over a few to neighbours, no-one got sick from them.
Mass-produced eggs from large-scale barns are definitely in need of monitoring and regulation, but that's because large-scale production has issues that aren't applicable to three or four hens in the back yard..
Re: (Score:2)
Pasteurizing eggs does not actually cook them. https://izzycooking.com/pasteu... [izzycooking.com].
With due respect, you don't actually know if any of your friends or neighbors ever got sick from your eggs.
Re: (Score:2)
Can't prove a negative, sure.
But I think i would have noticed a dose of salmonella.
Re: (Score:2)
You can be, and are wrong. If you build it, you own it and support it for the rest of its lifetime.
If they build it, they own it and support it for the rest of it's lifetime, and as you're paying them to do exactly that, and there's a vibrant marketplace of providers, they need to do it right or everyone tells them to fist themselves and moves their shit somewhere else overnight. Moreover, there's no rule that says you can only use one cloud provider - make your backups in a cloud-agnostic way, and send y
So that's why (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So that's why (Score:4, Interesting)
USPS has been consistently worse for me than fedex, but with that said, FedEx is clearly having IT problems lately. Their tracking page has been extremely hit and miss, as in, I have had to reload it a bunch of times before it will work. It's never a good look when the site just sometimes fails and sometimes doesn't with no explanation, it implies strongly that they don't know why it's failing.
Re:So that's why (Score:5, Insightful)
In my experience as a sysadmin, the move to cloud looks great at first and bites you later, when you already moved everything out and have no way back. Prices are good for starting but never goes down. Owning a mainframe is not cheap, but it's your hardware and you usually pay for the increase in performance, not the entire price of a new mainframe.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
USPS never does this, neither does UPS. Clearly Fedex needs to change their name to have more Us, Ss and Ps.
Re: (Score:2)
FedEx has "lost" three packages being sent to me so far this year. I say "lost" because they actually delivered them to my neighbor. There are only two houses on my street, mine, at #20, and my neighbor, at #15. It takes a special kind of idiot to consistently confuse 20 and 15.
Re: (Score:2)
FedEx has "lost" three packages being sent to me so far this year. I say "lost" because they actually delivered them to my neighbor. There are only two houses on my street, mine, at #20, and my neighbor, at #15. It takes a special kind of idiot to consistently confuse 20 and 15.
Is FedEx using Apple Maps? Because Apple Maps has done something similar to me a few times... ...although, it's been a while... Maps has improved since my last situation.
Those savings better be true (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It depends upon how much the management controls the numbers. If they have their necks out there, they'll find a way to make the numbers hit their projections...by hook or by crook.
Re: (Score:2)
mass layoff coming soon to offset the golden parachute calculations
savings? are they cutting staff? and moveing funds (Score:2)
savings? are they cutting staff? and moving funds around?
cloud is not free and local hubs may need more internet if there is no local servers.
Re: (Score:2)
cloud is not free and local hubs may need more internet if there is no local servers.
There's already no local servers. Everything in a FedEx location is now a web page. There's a computer in kiosk mode with the site in a corner for you to use, but their computers are also going to the/a website, presumably to a different login.
Re: (Score:2)
cloud is not free
The dude has a BS in computer science from the early 90s, but his advanced degree is an MBA. I doubt he's a particularly technical person (or at least hasn't been one for a couple decades).
However even technical people fall into this trap. Our department Chair - in a STEM field - seems to think you can move your on-premises servers into the cloud and then everything (new deployments, maintenance, application development, etc.) somehow happens automatically with little-to-no expenditure at any level.
Re: (Score:2)
azure is awesome (Score:5, Funny)
the simplest things take 10 times as long to do as on-prem and in some cases advertised features simply refuse to work or break when there is a backend update
keeps the IT people employed
Azure is awesome? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
you mean the ones that got fired to justify cloud ROI?
its all good, the govt will bail them out.
Re: (Score:2)
Only if you don't know what you're doing.
To do things right on-prem, it takes every bit as long. Most companies just don't bother to "do it right," they just go for the quickest, half-baked options.
How many on-prem dev and test environments are truly walled-off from production? Most aren't, because nobody bothered to take the time to set up the network routing correctly. How many on-prem identities are properly managed and segregated? Most aren't. They just skip these things because they can, and they aren'
Flexible, Secure, Cost-effective (Score:3, Interesting)
Flexible, no question.
Secure is a stretch. You're practically by definition not going to be *more* secure because you use a 3rd party service provider.
Cost-effective, well, let's see if that really happens in two years. If you're big enough to need data centers IMO you shouldn't actually need cloud services.
In dollar terms it was not cheaper for our small business to move to the cloud, even taking into account the time & money we spent managing our own hardware, but there are fewer headaches and there's less downtime.
Never seen "cloud" as cheaper in reality (Score:5, Interesting)
What they aren't saying is that they'll be spending $250 million every single year with some cloud provider, so at year three they've spent $750 million.
And if some cloud provider thought they were really saving your millions, they'd jack up the price as soon as whatever legal contract runs out. What are you going to do then? Move everything to a competitor? No, you'll just pay up and lay off some more staff to pay someone else.
I don't work with Fed-Ex, but I've never seen cloud actually come out cheaper in a 3-5 year run. Maybe their contracts with IBM or somebody was really bad, who knows how much of 400 million is real. They are probably "saving 400 million" year one because they don't have to replace 300 million in hardware and are killing $100 million in staff and datacenter costs. But if your long term costs are higher... does it make sense?
Re: Never seen "cloud" as cheaper in reality (Score:2)
Maybe they are running some products on the mainframe from Broadcom. That can make any cloud solution cheap by comparison.
Re: (Score:2)
Short Term Savings (Score:4)
Re: (Score:2)
could have been AWS (Score:2)
I'm suspicious of the final 20% (Score:3)
It will be interesting to see if the plan to have progress continue at a linear pace and reach the victory condition on schedule pans out; or if this is one of those "90% done; 90% to go..." projects; where they've lulled themselves into a false sense of security on softer targets and are now heading for either some crippling regressions and a series of crash fixes(if they pull the plug too quickly) or a bunch of optimistic targets that will be politely forgotten about, with the legacy systems left up, for a few years of largely ineffectual flailing.
Savings estimates (Score:3)
are like new-years resolutions, with similar outcomes.
Ok gonna short then (Score:3)
I am gonna go short of Fedex. These things never go as smoothly as planned. I've worked at a large telecom corp that started moving to dah cloud and then stopped, because it was too disruptive. Sure, new stuff is done cloud-native but the old applications, many of which are business-critical, remain in their own data centers on traditional servers and will likely continue in this manner for many years.
zero... er... nope (Score:4, Interesting)
"Zero datacenter" ... "cloud"... the guy doesn't realize that "the cloud" is just a bunch of data centers?
What he's moving to is zero ownership of his infrastructure. That can be smart or not, debatable - but it's not "zero datacenters", it's just "zero data centers that we own".
Re: (Score:2)
it's just "zero data centers that we own".
Well, yeah. Is anyone implying anything else? It's not like IT needs vanish. This makes sense for FedEx. I'm guessing that their infrastructure is widely distributed, and consequently largely redundant.
Re: (Score:3)
Well, yeah. Is anyone implying anything else?
Hell yes. He's talking exactly as if those data centers disappear. When, actually, I wouldn't be surprised if some large cloud provider buys them from FedEx and then rents them back to them as "the cloud".
Interesting definition of zero (Score:2)
Here to agree with most of the other comments! (Score:4, Insightful)
The cloud is nothing more than paying to run your stuff on other people's computers instead of your own. Does it make financial sense? Who knows? It may... It very likely only does in the short-term.
I agree with a consultant I worked with at a previous I.T. job, who said the single most advantageous thing to "cloudify" vs hosting on-prem is your email. With almost everyone doing Outlook these days, you may as well just buy your Outlook licenses as part of an O365 subscription and let Microsoft handle the mess that is back-end Exchange. Heck, even before MS offered such a thing, you were typically better off paying a third party to host Exchange for you because good email system specialists don't work cheap, and doing recovery on crashed Exchange servers has always been a painful, time-intensive process. Plus, you'll need almost the same amount of on-site bandwidth for email whether you host the thing on-prem or it's in the cloud, because all the messages have to come to each client individually if it's cloud hosted, or the same traffic all comes down to your local server(s) otherwise for local redistribution.
So much of the other stuff really doesn't benefit you much to put in the cloud, since application performance can get severely throttled that way due to limits the hosts impose on you, or bandwidth limitations you run up against. That or the CPU power you need winds up costing you big money in the cloud because they keep billing based on utilization over time, vs buying what you need once and using it as much as you want to.
Re: (Score:2)
" paying to run your stuff on other people's computers instead of your own"
When Amazon runs stuff on AWS for its own purposes, it doesn't suddenly stop being cloud services.
Re: Here to agree with most of the other comments! (Score:2)
re: higher bandwidth used for cloud email (Score:2)
That's true. But you're talking about one scenario; an email containing an attachment that gets delivered to a large number of mailboxes.
Except for very large corporations, those "1000 addresses in the org" belong to people geographically scattered about. There's not a single site getting hit with the total bandwidth usage to send your cat video because a given office doesn't have the whole org residing there.
Beyond that, you'd hope a junk filter stopped something like that from getting delivered out as spa
Absolute Clusterfuck Internally (Score:2, Interesting)
I worked inside the belly of the FedEx IT beast for 25+ years and I left a few months ago for much better pay and a much less frustrating job, but to avoid calling down a witch hunt on my friends, I've created a throwaway acct.
What saw for the last three years is an abject clusterfuck on an order of magnitude like I've never seen in my entire career there. Rather than invest in the systems that have run the company for years and continue to do so today, it's a constant drive to "but we have to rewrite ever
More Secure... Profit for AWS, etc. (Score:2)
Stating, or implying, that a Cloud provider is more secure than a modern mainframe environment is laughable. With a a stack based architecture to provide attack vectors, thus, making the only way to get system privileges is by being placed in an authorized library by an actual person, on the inside of the enterprise. Protected, encrypted memory in hard partitions run by a hardware hypervisor eliminates 99% of the attack vectors seen on PC based hardware.
Clearly, there is another motive at work with this ann
Re: (Score:2)
*without a stack based... sheesh
Saving? (Score:2)
Bad idea... (Score:2)
It will be interesting to see (Score:2)
... if the projected savings actually materialize.
Porting old mainframe programs to new systems is nontrivial and despite what the cloud salespeople say, the cloud is not a magic bullet
Look over there! (Score:2)
Is it me or does that seem... (Score:2)
...like an oddly excessive amount of data center cost?
I mean, I'd understand huge costs for salaries, trucks, planes, fuel but $400M on data costs?
It seems they ship around 6B packages a year which equates into about $0.07/package in data center costs which seems pretty high to me?
They're outsourcing their liability (Score:2)
Maybe they don't feel they can run their data center securely for less than it costs to rent server space/security/etc. So they're running their software on someone else's computer (the 'cloud') and letting someone else manage it all. Will probably cost them more per year, but also show some nice first quarter savings/profit, and might be better for them in the long run. It looks like they have recognized a weakness and responded to it.
Re: (Score:2)
Savings for who? (Score:2)
I know why (Score:2)
Amazon (Score:2)
Consolidation to benefit Amazon, IBM, and MS. Meanwhile, Amazon is running its own delivery service. Hasta la vista, Fedex, it was nice knowin' ya.
Save 400million? (Score:2)