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eBay - Staying Online - Always

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The existing hardware was also fast approaching a saturation point. To overcome these weaknesses, eBay decided to create separate databases for different auction categories. This ensured that in case of corruption, only one database would go down and only the people participating in that related category would be affected by the outage. In November 1999, eBay tied up with Sun Microsystems, VERITAS and Oracle to strengthen its hardware infrastructure.

The solution was based on tightly integrated clusters of Sun's enterprise 10000 servers, StorEdge disk arrays8, Solaris Operating Environment9, Oracle 8i enterprise relational database10 and a suite of VERITAS products. Before the solution was implemented eBay's server environment was thoroughly evaluated, including hardware inventories, configurations, performance, resource consumption and future growth potential. To capture the peaks and troughs of system performance due to the highly fluctuating traffic, statistics related to CPU utilization, CPU wait input/output, disk service time, disk utilization and memory usage were collected over several days to reflect varying workloads.

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8] Disk array helps companies to balance system performance, storage capacity, and PCI connectivity in a cost-effective manner. They are useful for environments where fast data transfers, efficient space utilization, and compatibility are critical concerns.

9] The environment in which users run programs. For example, the DOS environment consists of all the DOS commands available to users. The Macintosh environment, on the other hand, is a graphical user interface that uses icons and menus instead of commands.

10] Relational database management system stores data in the form of related tables. They require few assumptions about how data is related or how it will be extracted from the database. An important feature of relational systems is that a single database can be spread across several tables.