The ultrapopular auction/sales Web site continues its exponential growth and finds itself adding 10 terabytes of new storage every week. That's a lot of data.eBay, like Xerox and Google, is fast becoming its own generic verb for what it does ("Oh, just eBay it"). And when a company itself becomes the name for what it does, then a certain level of success has been reached.
A very high level of success. Among Web 2.0 companies, San Jose, Calif.-based eBay is right up there with Google, Amazon, Yahoo, eHarmony, SalesForce.com, and social networking sites MySpace.com and FaceBook.com as far as traffic, popularity and profitability are concerned.
Some of the facts and figures about the world's largest auction business and most popular commercial Web site are downright staggering:
The site averages more than 1 billion page views per day.
Users trade about $1,700 worth of goods on the site every second.
A vehicle sells every minute.
A motor part or accessory sells every second.
Diamond jewelry sells every 2 minutes.
The site currently has about 600 million listings and about 204 million registered users.
This one, in particular, is striking: 1.3 million people make all or part of their living selling on eBay.
To put this into a little perspective, FDR's two largest New Deal jobs programs, the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Civil Works Administration, employed a total of 6.5 million workers in the 1930s.
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.
Read the full story on eWeek: Web 2.0: How High-Volume eBay Manages Its Storage
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