eBay - Staying Online - Always

Technology Contd...

They argued that other high-traffic sites used more loosely integrated server farms¹¹, in which many small, low-end servers perform identical functions in a redundant configuration. The search engine Google, for instance, used 4,000 Linux servers that searched and served web pages in parallel, while Yahoo used clusters of Unix servers. If one server went down, the rest picked up the load.

To tackle the problems in its storage system, eBay partnered with Sun to develop a storage solution, with high availability, resilience, and serviceability known as Storage Area Network (SAN)¹². Webb explained the benefits, "We have been moving and segmenting our entire database server into smaller servers. This helps ensure we don't have any single point of failure.

In other words, an outage will affect just a portion of the system not the whole site. It will also be more cost-effective because the SAN will enable us to have six or more front-end machines to every two-recovery machines, instead of a one-to-one cluster. A SAN will also allow us to scale the system without accruing any downtime."

In September 2001, eBay went on a major software revamp to improve its site availability and make it more dynamic and interconnected. After reviewing more than 20 vendors, the company finally opted for IBM and its WebSphere application server and began to put in place its 'V3' application architecture. eBay also revamped its server-side application development architecture to support the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE)¹³ and Enterprise JavaBeans¹⁴.

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11] A server farm is a group of networked servers that are located in one area. It streamlines the internal processes by distributing the workload between the individual components of the farm and expedites computing processes because of multiple servers.

12] Storage Area Network (SAN) is a high-speed sub network of shared storage devices, which contain disks for storing data. It makes all storage devices available to all servers on a LAN or WAN.

13] J2EE was the de facto industry standard for developing Java applications. It includes technologies for deploying web services that enable applications to work in conjunction on the web.

14] Java beans are portable, reusable Java software components. EJBs extend the Java bean concept from the client domain to the server domain. EJBs enable the usage of Java technology into a robust, scalable environment that can support mission-critical enterprise information systems.

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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