eBay - Staying Online - Always

Background Note Contd...

According to a former staff member, eBay had not installed redundant storage hardware⁵ to take over if the main storage system failed, even after six years of the site's launch in 1995. Though the management had been warned about the risk of storage failure and was recommended an upgrade in the storage infrastructure, the expense was not approved. eBay's initial applications relied on a single large database. Till January 2001, a single Oracle database supported the item listings and auction operations. When eBay began to split the database, resource constraints and a divided management came in the way of initiating major changes.

Technology

eBay's infrastructure, built in 1995, was initially designed in-house to support buying and selling between small groups of collectors and hobbyists. The company used Pentium based Internet servers that ran on Windows NT operating system. For Internet connectivity, it had entered into a partnership with Exodus and AboveNet Communications located at Santa Clara in California. These two companies hosted eBay's web servers, database servers and Internet routers.

Most of eBay's software had also been developed in-house. After the June 1999 outage, eBay realized that its infrastructure was not flexible, scalable and reliable. It initiated steps to strengthen the server infrastructure.

The company decided to replace the existing Sun enterprise 10000 servers, working singularly and with limited scalability, with IBM mainframe and AIX Unix servers. In the first phase, the company implemented a backup solution that allowed the network to recover within four hours by increasing redundancy on servers, routers⁶, switches and RAID⁷ drives. The company then built another back up solution – a running duplicate of major systems that reduced the recovery period to one hour. In the second phase, eBay set up an eight-person IT group to evaluate and implement a more sophisticated network. The group's main challenge was to ensure the database's resiliency, which had more than three million items appearing concurrently. As the entire list was in a single database, even a minor corruption could affect the entire network.

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5] Additional storage hardware, which serves as a backup, in case the main storage system fails.

6] A device that connects local area networks. They can communicate with each other and configure the best route between two hosts ensuring very little filtering of data.

7] RAID or Redundant array of disk drives. The use of two or more disk drives provide better disk performance, error recovery and fault tolerance. RAID also helped in mirroring of data.

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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