11-01-2006, 08:42 PM
Quote:eBay is handling all those transactions, Web site page views and money changing hands on a near-no-latency, 24/7, international basis. The site's availability has been charted at 99.94 percent per day (a hiccup of about 50 seconds per day). When it was charted in June 1999, the site was latent an average of 43 minutes per day.
How eBay got to this level of technical efficiency and success is a long story. What we can do is offer an overview about how the company approaches its storage strategy—something that the company hasn't talked about with the media before.
Not many Web-based businesses have run into the kind of traffic and server-availability issues that eBay has experienced...
eBay's storage engineering team (numbering "in the teens," Strong said) utilizes 2 petabytes of raw digital space on a daily basis to run the site and store its data, yet has to add about 10 terabytes of new storage every week to cover new transactions...
full article: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2042849,00.asp