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eBay: Page 2 of 5

Strong wouldn't name any vendors, but eBay is a big Sun shop and he came over from Sun. (See Sun Powers eBay.)

eBay uses a grid to manage servers, databases, and storage tools in aggregate pools, and the company develops most of its storage management tools in house.

"We treat our entire data center as a grid," Strong says. "We integrate all of our tools into the grid. That includes storage and data management."

Why build applications to manage all that storage?

"We have to," he says. "We get commercial off-the-shelf solutions and do horrible things to them. Commercial storage management tools are great at managing heterogeneous environments with the lowest common denominator. We break them. If there's a lot of customization involved, we just build it. Why pay licensing fees if we have to customize it anyway?"