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Comment by iheartmemcache | Hacker News Reader

This is such a perception skewed by Silicon-Valley-Syndrome.

This is how the rest of the world works -- I run an import/export business and have to manage logistics. It doesn't matter what industry, it could be crude oil or widgets from China at half a penny a piece. It's my job as CIO to choose an implementation.

I'm going to choose SAP or Dynamics (or one of the handful of other ERP's with name recognition) on DB2 or Oracle. I'm going to store my data on EMC dual array filers for HA and pay the tax. Why? Because if I choose node.js and MongoDB to run my 3 warehouses and the system goes down, I'm getting voted out next board meeting. If my SAP R/3 on IBM hardware goes down, they'll do the dance and at least fly some people out to retain their image keeping your job effectively safe.

Banks aren't going to move over from z/OS anytime soon. I don't want my dialysis machine to be running on Riak.

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So two things:

1. Cloud providers are making it easy for legacy businesses to take baby steps. You don't have to use a NoSQL solution with AWS Dynamo, you can use Postgres with RDS. Or if you're hyper-conservative/stuck with legacy stuff, you can run Oracle with RDS. Or get an EC2 instance and install your own personal copy of Oracle on it. You don't have to jump to full modernity right away, you can take the easy wins of hosted infrastructure first, and only later move up to the bigger wins of hosted platforms.

2. Yes, legacy stuff takes forever to disappear. There are still businesses running VMS inside of VAX emulators with COBOL apps on them. But once you're in that "super-conservative businesses won't move away from you anytime soon" area, you're in a declining market. New businesses unencumbered by legacy won't go down that road -- small businesses starting today will never buy an on-site server to start with (thanks to Office 365/Google Apps/etc.), and as they grow there's no reason for them to change that policy anymore. EMC might never get a new customer, and even if they keep their old ones for some time, it's just a question of how fast their decline is.

    Or get an EC2 instance and install your own personal copy 
    of Oracle on it.

Good luck with the licensing for running Oracle on an EC2 instance. How many different cores will Oracle potentially be running on? Thousands with the way EC2 works. Just wait till Oracle does an audit and watch your back licensing fees skyrocket. But don't worry! There's a way out. Just move it all to Oracle's new in house cloud. They'll even help with the move for a very "reasonable" consulting fee.

No doubt. I tried to move our Oracle installation[1] from an aging box to our VMWare server and the price jump was going to be something on the order of 5x.

1) another one of those fun vendor software needs Oracle things

That's why AWS launched dedicated instances, pretty much for exactly this use case.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-ec2-dedicated-instan...

Working at real scale, I'd choose some cages in a datacenter I can walk in and place offices at over AWS anytime.

Btw you'd cry if I were allowed call out some companies that still run lotus notes.

Lotus Notes is a fine example of what we're talking about. Yes, companies use it, but no company is ever going to switch to Notes. The companies that use Notes in 2020 is going to be the ones that use it in 2015 minus the ones that quit using it. That's what "walking dead" means.

> Btw you'd cry if I were allowed call out some companies that still run lotus notes.

I worked for one (Raytheon). :/

This makes no sense.

How many Amazon, Google or Microsoft engineers (or even SREs) have ever set foot in one of their datacenters.

Hint: the answer is basically none.

Yes not to mention the thousands of companies that have to deal with Ex/Im laws that cannot move to "the cloud". Not to mention the CIOs that will have to tell there lawyers that all there IP is leaving the network...but don't worry, it's still secure. The list goes on.

The other thing is the writer seems overwhelmingly fond of Pure Storage...until they are bought by one of his Walking Dead. Instead of calling these companies "Walking Dead", he should be highlighting more the approach Microsoft has done. What Dell/EMC, IBM, Cisco, HP, and more will start to see is that they can operate in both worlds. Amazon will never turn over there stack to a company so that it can operate inside that companies physical control, but the listed companies (like Microsoft) can make there stacks available "in the cloud" and palpable to the public furthering there market.

To me, whereas Amazon and the like have plenty of growth ahead of them, these "Walking Dead" have higher ceilings although it will take quite a bit of inertial change. I can see IBM already working and heading in that direction. If they (like Microsoft) become another success story, it will be hard for the others to ignore that strategy.

But the author got his clicks and his eyes...so I'm sure we'll see of this.

True of nearly every company I've worked at or for.

The old joke was "no one ever got fired for buying IBM".

It's not even about what the best technology is for a solution but rather the intersection of what's the best I can buy that isn't gonna get me fired if it goes wrong.

And then there is Elon Musk who told his CIO to build their own manufacturing planning system because he refused to give that much money to SAP or Oracle.

Ps. Having migrated an SAP off of AIX, I'd say you'd be better served with something like a VBlock or even VirtuStream or Amazon cloud to run it. There also are price and performance incentives to run R/4 on HANA than on Oracle.

Vblock is a management and communication nightmare. It runs on an independent AD domain with no integration with your own environment. It's just like having your own hardware in your own rack, but you have to call them to fix what you'd just normally fix internally. You have to have people who know VMWare, Cisco, and SAN to run one, more efficient to just set up a vCenter.

You can fix a VBlock yourself quite fine if you stay within its constraints, though the point is to get out of the business of fixing this stuff yourself - it's undifferentiated heavy lifting. Wire and walk away as a transition towards data center zero. Yes theyre isolated by design, but unified management isnt hard to do. I've seen places save tens of millions getting off IBM or EDS outsourcing replaced with converged.

Well, if you're consolidating by replacing five vendors with one, that can have cost savings in unified billing and administration alone, and simplified environment management - one stop for all your server needs - is indeed another benefit.

I've been a contractor for a firm that still runs their own mainframe for data transformation, and had Cisco experts on the payroll. They ran their own vCenter instances integrated with their Active Directory, so moving with them to Vblock was painful mostly in giving up control.

Musk isn't worryabout being fired and making his mortgage payments (eve though he once came perilously close to being broke on his liquid investments). Most people charged with making IT decisions are worried about this.

Ahh, but should one act in business to not get fired, or to do the right thing for the organization?

I personally couldn't look myself in the mirror , speaking as a former VP of IT ops at a large company, if I made a decision where the primary concern was for my job stability. In fact, the fact that I could get fired for making the difficult choice usually was a good sign. I'm not talking about making reckless decisions, I'm talking things like firing IBM outsourcing because they're price gouging and risking the inevitable call to our board of directors that is attempting to get me and my boss (the CIO) fired.

That said I do agree many IT people make the decision for their own stability first, and the company second. That usually is due to a poor business leader that promotes a risk averse culture - unlike a Reed Hastings or Elon Musk.

Don't forget the case where the last CIO who was trusted and is friends with the CEO and CFO went to work for a major vendor.

There will be a Logistics As A Service company or an upstart competitor will integrate with them.

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