Business & Money Trail:

VERITAS, ORACLE AND SUN JOIN FORCES AT eBAY

In only five years, eBay has grown from a small Web site created for the buying and selling of collectables, to the world's largest and most popular person-to-person Internet trading community. To maintain its leading Internet position, eBay recently replaced its five-year-old system with one designed to support a 200 percent growth rate every six months and weekly software environment changes. Maynard Webb, president, eBay Technologies, explained how the company teamed with VERITAS, Oracle and Sun (VOS) to implement a high availability cluster and how the VOS Joint Escalation Center (JEC) has helped maintain high levels of system performance and availability.

"VERITAS, Oracle and Sun banded together and created a series of solutions that eBay evaluated, modified and implemented-including a high availability cluster that has been a big success for us. Very few companies in the industry have experienced our rate of growth and speed of change. To increase system availability while also dealing with our day-to-day business demands was quite a challenge. We needed teammates who understood our issues, worked quickly, built quality products and supported our business. With VERITAS, Oracle and Sun (VOS), we sought to supplement our engineering skills and build organizational discipline and maturity-while also taking care of issues we did not have time to handle while keeping our business moving."

"Our timelines were aggressive with practice drills built in to ensure our new clustered configuration was right before it went live. The VOS group worked with our staff to form a seamless team that integrated and tested the new system. The dedicated professionals held many scheduled dry runs between 1:00-5:00 AM. In November 1999, eBay migrated to the new environment during a regularly scheduled, three-hour system maintenance period. The new configuration worked successfully. The team pulled off the deployment going into eBay's busiest season without any customers knowing we had actually done it."

"It's a phenomenal idea to have our major suppliers collaborating to solve problems. The JEC staff is a group of some of the best and brightest of the three companies -- working together."

"By implementing a high availability cluster, we have significantly improved our availability to the entire Internet community. Before, if we needed to failover to another machine, our average downtime was between two and four hours. With the new system, it's between 10 minutes to one hour."

"The progress we've made internally as well as with our vendors has been huge. When we have issues, everybody is working them together to come up with a common answer. VOS knows that the job pressure at eBay is intense. It doesn't do anybody any good to finger point. What we need to do is figure out what the issue is and resolve it. Today, that is how our team behaves."

"We're very excited about the recently announced VOS Joint Escalation Center (JEC) and have already used it. Our software engineers discovered that high buffer waits in our databases were impacting system performance but they could not identify the cause. The JEC was engaged and it identified that software code was driving the issue. The combination of everybody working together helped us to quickly resolve it."

"It's a phenomenal idea to have our major suppliers collaborating to solve problems. The JEC staff is a group of some of the best and brightest of the three companies-working together. When you're in a multi-vendor environment, a solution that makes the products appear like they are from one company is a great answer. Rather than working three escalation chains back and forth, the JEC enables us to work one. Though we hope we don't have to use the JEC very often, it is great to know it's there. We want to be able to leverage the JEC's expertise in a more pro-active fashion going forward to help us in our system planning efforts. We will always be extremely supportive of a solution that finds a way to continue to make eBay's site more powerful, available and scalable."