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Internet retail giant eBay revealed its new data-center design strategy at the Gartner Data Center Conference in Las Vegas this week.
According to a report by TechTarget, eBay’s new strategy focuses on sustainability, with a view on keeping data center costs down.
The company was forced to rethink its strategy after realising its predicted growth – eBay now sells US$2,000 worth of goods every second and has 90 million users, whcih equate to 93 billion database calls and 50 terabytes of incremental data every day. This would have meant eBay had to build a number of new data centers each year.
The company’s VP of operations Mazen Rawashdeh said the cost of running its sites would, in the end, cost the company money.
So eBay decided to consolidate its facilities and use leased commodity hardware, lower-power servers and more open source solutions to help it bring down costs while maintaining growth. It also had to change its business model and metrics to focus more closely on cost-per-watt, instead of bandwidth, Rawashdeh said.
Purchasing hardware, when requirements were ever changing, was a cost to eBay, it said. Leasing has allowed it to take "full advantage of new technologies within a reasonable window".
"We normalized all these metrics to focus on efficiency of power and energy in our data center,"Rawashdeh said.
"Transactions per second is no longer our primary metric;it is transactions per watt, dollars per watt. The focus on a common metric helped us do more with less."Indeed, energy consumption at the company dropped by 70%, while in 2009, the total worth of goods sold on eBay was $60 billion."
According to a report by TechTarget, eBay’s new strategy focuses on sustainability, with a view on keeping data center costs down.
The company was forced to rethink its strategy after realising its predicted growth – eBay now sells US$2,000 worth of goods every second and has 90 million users, whcih equate to 93 billion database calls and 50 terabytes of incremental data every day. This would have meant eBay had to build a number of new data centers each year.
The company’s VP of operations Mazen Rawashdeh said the cost of running its sites would, in the end, cost the company money.
So eBay decided to consolidate its facilities and use leased commodity hardware, lower-power servers and more open source solutions to help it bring down costs while maintaining growth. It also had to change its business model and metrics to focus more closely on cost-per-watt, instead of bandwidth, Rawashdeh said.
Purchasing hardware, when requirements were ever changing, was a cost to eBay, it said. Leasing has allowed it to take "full advantage of new technologies within a reasonable window".
"We normalized all these metrics to focus on efficiency of power and energy in our data center,"Rawashdeh said.
"Transactions per second is no longer our primary metric;it is transactions per watt, dollars per watt. The focus on a common metric helped us do more with less."Indeed, energy consumption at the company dropped by 70%, while in 2009, the total worth of goods sold on eBay was $60 billion."