eBay - Staying Online - Always

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The data provided a detailed system performance report that resulted in a decision to go for the new cluster configuration. The hardware solution consisted of a two-tiered, clustered architecture. The top tier consisted of one enterprise 10000 server, (also known as Starfire) that drove e-commerce and VERITAS front-end database applications such as Cluster Server, Database Edition for Oracle, NetBackup, Volume Manager and File System.

In the bottom tier, another enterprise 10000 server powered Solaris Operating Environment and an Oracle8i database. Maynard Webb, President of eBay Technologies, explained the benefits of this architecture, "The two Starfire servers supporting eBay's production environment are clustered and a third provides failover for disaster recovery. The cluster gives us the ability to quickly failover: if a server or database is unavailable, the other can take over. Another Starfire server was used to support eBay's quality assurance operations and two for the company's test environment. Enterprise 6500 and Enterprise 4500 servers powered the search engines.

Additionally, StorEdge disk arrays housed over 2.7 terabytes of data. Numerous workstations also supported various functions including software development and system administration. The enterprise servers provided an ideal platform to eBay for numerous applications including enterprise resource planning, electronic commerce, data warehousing, Internet/Intranet and customer management systems. With the clustered server architecture, eBay significantly improved its site availability.

The company had also reduced the average downtime of failover to another machine, which was previously between two to four hours to between 10 minutes and one hour. The new hardware solution helped eBay to handle much higher traffic compared to its previous setup.

By late 2000, eBay's site was handling about 130 million page views with more than 18 million registered users compared to 65 million page views and about 8 million registered users in June 1999. The site supported about 18 million searches a day compared to three to four million searches a day previously. The company also managed to lower its operating cost by two percent in 2000. However, despite the above infrastructure, eBay faced another outage in January 2001. A hardware failure in one of the backup systems had caused the outage.

After the system was restarted, another problem in the primary and backup systems brought down the site. eBay's third backup system was not of much help as a database problem brought down the site again after 40 minutes. Industry experts felt that though the clustered server approach was easier to administer, it was also more prone to breakdowns as the servers shared central resources, like the operating and storage systems.

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Case Details

Case Code : ITSY015
Themes: Internet Companies
Case Length : 08 Pages
Period : 1995-2001
Organization : eBay
Pub Date : 2002
Teaching Note : Available
Countries : USA
Industry : Information Technology

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