eBay - STAYING ONLINE - ALWAYS
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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.
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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, routers[1] , switches and RAID[2]
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.. |
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A 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. 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 arrays[3] ,
Solaris Operating Environment[4], Oracle 8i enterprise relational database[5] 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. The data provided a
detailed system performance report that resulted in a decision to go for the new
cluster configuration.
The hardware solution consisted of a
two-tiered, clustered architecture. The top tier consisted of one enterprise
10000 server, (also known as Starfire) that drove e-commerce and VERITAS
front-end database applications such as Cluster Server, Database Edition for
Oracle, NetBackup, Volume Manager and File System. In the bottom tier, another
enterprise 10000 server powered Solaris Operating Environment and an Oracle8i
database. Maynard Webb, President of eBay Technologies, explained the benefits
of this architecture, "The two Starfire servers supporting eBay's production
environment are clustered and a third provides failover for disaster recovery.
The cluster gives us the ability to quickly failover: if a server or database is
unavailable, the other can take over."
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REAPING THE BENEFITS
[1] 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.
[2] 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.
[3] 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.
[4] 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.
[5] 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.
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