FedEx Corporation plans to close its data centers and will retire the remaining 20% of mainframes within the next two years. With this move, the company aims to have $400 million of savings annually.
Aiming zero data center, zero mainframes
The company aims to get rid of all of its data centers for cost-saving purposes
During its investor day, a company representative from FedEx talked about the cooperation’s goal is to get rid of its data centers and mainframes and move all data to a cloud-based environment for lowering costs. The company will lean on its cloud-native architecture to run business operations, delivering better visibility and control.
Founded in 1971, FedEx opened its first physical data center in 2008 and added more during the years. In 2019, the company signed a 10-year deal with the Las Vegas company Switch serving as FedEx’s western U.S. data center. According to the agreement, Switch would deliver 2.5 MW of capacity in the first year, and up to 8 MW by year ten. FedEx, Dell Technologies, and Switch had announced their collaboration to develop exascale multi-cloud edge infrastructure services. It is not known yet if this collaboration has been already in the works.