eBay's in-house tools help the IT staff build scalability and redundancy into its storage, which Strong fondly calls "rotating rust." Its data centers are set up with "multiple SAN paths, up to four paths per LUN for highest performing storage. We maximize our ports, cache, and disks per array," he says. He keeps up to four copies of each database. To split traffic evenly, eBay carves its database clusters into around 600 partitions.
Because eBay's site is its business, Strong's goal is to keep the site up and running at close to 100 percent at all times. That means code changes and anything else that affects the databases must be done while the site stays up.
"It's like changing the engine on a turbo jet at 36,000 feet," he says. "We can't stop, we can't land, and we have to do it with minimum impact on users."
eBay has grown from 1 million outbound emails and 54 page views per day in June of 1999 to 35 million outbound emails and 874 million page views by the end of last year. Yet availability rose from just under 97 percent to 99.94 percent.
Still, Strong feels there is room for improvement -- or at least room to do as well with a lot less manual intervention. He's a big proponent of grid standards as a way to automate processes.
Bob Friday, Chief AI Officer for Juniper Networks, explains how the advanced technology is transforming operations.
Contact center leaders from 8x8, Awaken Intelligence, and 360insight discuss the importance of agent experience.
AI may force enterprises to rewire parts of their data centers so they are fully optimized to run such workloads. The question is do you use Ethernet or InfiniBand?
