Web 2.0: How High-Volume eBay Manages Its Storage

eBays storage engineering team ("Eleven people," Strong said) utilizes 2 petabytes of raw digital space on a daily basis to run the site and store its data, yet has to add about 10 terabytes (or 75 volumes) of new storage every week to cover new transactions, Strong said.

That follows alongside the eHarmony story: That highly successful social networking site has to purchase additional storage about every 90 days.

eBay said it uses a traditional grid computing system with the following features to build the site:

• about 170 Win2000/Win2003 servers
• about 170 Linux (RHES3) servers
• three Solaris servers: build and deploy eBay.com to QA; compile Java & C++; consolidate/optimize/compress XSL, JS and HTML
• time to build site: was once 10 hours; now only 30 minutes
• in the last 2.5 years, there have been 2 million builds.

Then, the content is deployed to a system of about 15,000 servers.

eBay uses a number of different products in its storage setup, including switches from Brocade, software framework from IBM Tivoli, NAS (network-attached storage) hardware from NetApp (5 percent of the system) and large arrays from Hitachi Data Systems (95 percent of the system), Strong said. It also runs Oracle DB, he said.

"Oh, Im sure Im leaving somebody out. Theres probably something from each of the major storage manufacturers somewhere in our system," Strong said.

eBay maintains four copies of most of its databases, according to Strong.

eBays main data centers are spread out over the continental United States, and it also has co-locations all around the world, he said.

Next Page: Becoming an eBay supplier.

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