Because of SUNW signing eBay and the VRTS/SUNW/ORCL deal thought that this would be a good read....
Case Study
Keeping Outages at Bay at eBay
Top US on-line auction house eBay, notorious for the exploits of some of its clients, who have tried amongst other things to sell a baby and a human kidney, has had a few problems of its own that are of a more technical nature. Many hours of down-time in 1999, which has denied customers access to its sales, has led one wag to suggest that eBay should post a notice on its sites concerning "unscheduled up-time" rather than "unscheduled down-time". Customers are understandably annoyed over the poor reliability of eBay's operation, especially the growing number of businesses that are reliant for revenue on sales made at on-line auctions. However, this seems to have put only a little dent into eBay's revenue growth, although its share price has been rocked every time news of yet another outage reaches the press. The company's faults have led to it being rather coy about its internal operations, but enough has leaked out to establish an interesting picture of e-commerce at the leading edge.
Growth of a Legend
eBay is a legend in the annals of e-commerce. Started in September 1995, and located in San Jose, California, the company has grown from a handful of articles to one of the largest sites on the Internet with, at the last count, 3,969,357 items for sale in 4,320 categories at its US site alone. More than 450,000 new items are put up for sale every day -- a figure still on the upward path. The number of registered users jumped to 10 million by the end of 1999, an increase of 359 per cent from the 2.2 million users of only one year previously. In the last quarter of 1999, over 41 million auctions were completed on eBay, with a value of traded goods of $901 million. More than 1.5 billion page views are made per month.
Expansion is top of eBay's objectives, and it has opened 53 regionally-oriented US sites called "eBay: Go Local!", to attract buyers and sellers wishing to trade closer together. It has also launched sites internationally in Australia, Canada, Germany, and the UK. According to Media Metrix, a US marketing research organisation, eBay set a new record high in the average number of visitors coming to its site of 1.8 million in early January 2000. eBay's daily reach to US Web surfers topped 6.5 per cent, outpacing the second place site, Amazon.com, by more than half. Unlike most dot.com sites, eBay actually makes a profit. Net income increased to $11 million on revenues of $225 million in 1999, up from $7 million and $86 million respectively, the previous year. Currently, eBay has approximately 130 employees.
The scale of eBay's operations, and the rapid growth in transactions, has undeniably created a strained computing infrastructure. In addition, its fame has led it to become the ultimate reference site, which many of its suppliers have used as a calling card into other e-commerce opportunities. This has resulted in eBay, along with a handful of other top sites such as eTrade and Yahoo, being almost invariably mentioned in any article about on-line trading. A veritable posse of vendors and service providers has helped put the "e" in eBay, including Andersen Consulting, Cisco, Compaq Computer, Exodus Communications, Microsoft, Oracle Corporation, Sun Microsystems, USWeb/CKS, and Veritas Software.
In fact, the competition to help the company is becoming almost as intense as some of the bidding at its auctions. eBay's brand name gives increased credibility to those companies associated with it. For instance, Compaq, IBM, and Sun have auctioned surplus IT equipment on eBay's site, and released the news as major publicity events. Some companies place eBay among their list of clients, although they may have only performed as little as one week's work for the site. It has even had to go as far as asking those companies that have no business associating themselves with the auction site, to desist from using the eBay name.
E-Commerce Pioneer
eBay is relatively self-sufficient in its site development, compared to today's enterprises that are beginning to implement e-commerce sites. They often outsource the task and this can require dozens of prime and sub-contractors. Full-service Web integration consulting had not been invented when eBay was founded, but the sheer scale of its operation and the continual pressure to ramp-up the site, has resulted in a rather diverse range of IT equipment. Over 200 Compaq servers running Microsoft Windows NT have been installed, and many are used for handling front-office requests for information on items listed for sale on the auction pages.
Business-critical data is held in Oracle databases supported by dozens of powerful Sun Starfire servers using the Solaris operating system. The company's storage management is provided by Veritas, while networking equipment is supplied by Cisco. The company employs Sun D1000 and A3500 Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) units, mirrored in real-time. To improve performance, the company uses RAID 5 disk striping, spreading the data across multiple drives.
BizzFact
Walt Disney Co.'s Go Network and eBay have signed a four-year agreement to create two co-branded auction sites: a person-to-person site and a merchant-to- consumer site featuring Disney and ESPN merchandise.
It also uses solid state disks from Imperial Technologies, each storing 50GB to 100GB of data. On-line auctioning is a specialist business and standard enterprise software is not always capable of supporting the level of operation required. A case in point is searching for items across the site. The company uses Thunderstone's Texis suite of relational search engine and text retrieval technologies, which can handle the hundreds of thousands of indexes done every day.
Significantly, it has worked out its strategy largely on its own, although USWeb/CKS's branding and marketing team helped to design the colourful eBay logo. Andersen Consulting advised the company on the direction of eBay's internal IT department, and SystemExperts Corporation supplied security advice after hackers attempted to breach eBay's systems last year. Also from San Jose, CAT Technology, a Value Added Reseller (VAR) of Sun and Cisco systems, supplies hardware and basic services to eBay, and also coordinates the installation of Web servers with eBay's two Web hosting companies, Exodus and AboveNet Communications. Web servers are stored in "lights out" data centres with a high bandwidth connection to the Internet backbone, and are managed remotely by eBay staff from the company's headquarters.
Growing Pains
The reason for the much publicised outages at eBay can be put down to growing pains and management oversights. In June 1999, bugs in Sun's Solaris software caused multiple corruption of Oracle's databases. Sun had warned of the problem several months in advance, but pressure of work meant that the required patches were not applied to eBay's computers. In addition, eBay had been preparing a "warm" standby system, but was not ready for the failure of its primary system when it occurred. Over a six-month period, the company was out of action for 57 hours.
The longest period spent out of commission was 22 hours, resulting in approximately five million dollars of lost revenue and around a quarter knocked off its share price. The company's technology partners had more than two dozen engineers working to solve the problem, including overnight shifts. A report of the event even appeared on the front page of the New York Times. The company returned all auction fees due, at the time of its worst outage, and extended auction closing by two days. Large numbers of its customers temporarily defected to rivals Amazon.com and Yahoo, and consequently, the Web page viewing figures halved for the week. eBay has since instituted an automatic auction extension policy, which means that any outage lasting for two hours or more, results in an automatic lengthening in the time allowed to place bids of an extra 24 hours.
BizzQuote
"At first I was hesitant to sell on-line because I thought it would be difficult, but since I started on eBay three months ago, I have already sold over $75,000 worth of merchandise."
Edward Ciliberti An eBay User and Antique Business Owner
Viewed by outsiders as a somewhat shaky operation, eBay brought in experienced management to regain control, including a new president to oversee the company's IT architecture, technology and engineering. It was forced to temporarily retract feature enhancements, such as its personalised "My eBay" pages and an enhanced user interface. eBay now ensures that it has more than sufficient computing power to run its operation, and typically experiences a comparatively low, 50 per cent loading rate. Backups and maintenance are done while the system is running, but occasionally the site must be taken down, and this is scheduled for Friday mornings before 4am. However, increased international demand is forcing eBay to phase out this maintenance time window. A new high availability system has recently been installed to reduce to the minimum, any possibility of a recurrence of its earlier problems.
Lessons Learned
Now, Internet e-commerce sites are expected by the public to be available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and every day of the year. Part of the reason that eBay has been so flaky is that periodic downtime for maintenance is virtually impossible. Another is a data flow model that puts greater strain than normal on the database. For most Web sites, the traffic is very asymmetric and most of the data travels in one direction, out to the user. However, at eBay, flow is generally bi-directional as sellers list their items, and bidders engage in searches and transactions. In addition, the company has extended from just an auction site into an on-line community, with discussion forums and local groups. Users no longer have to be at their desktop PCs either, as bids can be notified and placed from wireless pagers and Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs).
In comparison, in many countries and even a few US states, most of the "bricks and mortar" shops are still closed on Sundays. For many people, perhaps hundreds of thousands, eBay and its competitors represent a new business opportunity. Auction sites are not restricted to just hobbyists, but they are a low cost way to get into retailing for people selling a wide variety of items. After one outage, an angry antique dealer claimed to be selling $2,000 to $4,000 of merchandise a day, via eBay. Customers can quickly lose confidence in repeated e-commerce failures, and take their custom elsewhere. Butler Group believes that eBay, for all its faults, has kept on growing, which shows that the human need to sell and barter is not to be dissuaded for long, and that the Internet fills this need in an easier and more convenient way.
ANd here is the PR of the SUNW/ebay deal...
EBAY CHOOSES SUN FOR THE LONG HAUL
Sun Selected as the Premier Supplier of Servers, Software, Storage and Service for eBay
After a rigorous review of different proposals from the industry's largest computer manufacturers, eBay©, the world's leading online personal trading community, announced Tuesday that it has selected Sun Microsystems Inc. as its premier supplier of servers, software, storage and professional services.
Running on Sun technology since its earliest days in 1995, today eBay is one of the Internet's most heavily trafficked sites, with more than 1.8 million daily unique visitors and over $12 million in gross merchandise sales transacted on the site each day.
Both Hewlett-Packard Company and IBM competed to capture eBay's business, but were rebuffed by the strength of Sun's product and service offerings.
"After carefully weighing our options and determining our needs for eBay's future system architecture, we decided that Sun has clearly demonstrated a proven combination of technology performance and service," said Maynard Webb, president of eBay Technologies. "Sun has been with us from the very beginning and has helped make eBay the success it is today. We will continue to work very hard together to continually advance eBay's site reliability and scalability."
The eBay site is built around Sun Enterprise[tm] servers running the Solaris[tm] operating environment, as well as Sun StorEdge[tm] storage devices. Sun's Professional Services team is assisting eBay technical experts in designing the company's future-generation architecture.
"Sun is proud to be the premier technology supplier for eBay, and to work together to provide eBay's customers with the performance and reliability they expect," said Edward Zander, president and COO of Sun Microsystems. "Sun clearly has the technology and service capabilities to help manage eBay's tremendous database volumes, while continuing to grow with the company's infrastructure needs."
Execution between the two parties is expected during the next several weeks. Other terms and financial details of the deal have not been disclosed.
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