eBay Picks Utah for $334 Million Data Center

Online auction site eBay has chosen a suburb of Salt Lake City as the site for a $334 million data center project. The company said yesterday that it has purchased land in South Jordan, Utah in the Daybreak Commerce Park, not far from where Oracle Corp. (ORCL) is building a huge data center.

The two projects have raised the profile of Utah as a destination for large data centers. As was the case with Oracle, eBay will take advantage of generous incentives from the local government. The state Office of Economic Development offered eBay $27.3 million in tax incentives over 10 years to build the facility in Utah, according to the Salt Lake Tribune.

eBay (EBAY) was known to be focusing its data center search on the Southwest, including sites in Phoenix, Arizona and Utah. The facility, which could be as large as 250,000 square feet, would continue a regional expansion that has seen eBay acquire a large data center in Phoenix and expand its facility in Denver. The company is believed to have six data centers, including facilities in San Jose, Sacramento and Austin, Texas.

eBay’s Infrastructure and Cloudy Ambitions

eBay continues to add infrastructure to support its immense auction site, where its 84 million registered users generate more than $2,000 in economic activity every second. Paul Strong, a distinguished research scientist at eBay, recently discussed the site’s phenomenal growth with E-Commerce Times. Strong says that eBay, which started life on “three or four machines that (founder) Pierre Omidyar built from parts in his living room one weekend in 1995,” now has more than 15,000 servers in its six data centers. Here’s an excerpt:

All of our applications essentially scale out across hundreds or thousands of servers. In essence, our infrastructure is already a form of grid. Most of the applications we run are transaction-oriented in nature, but the platform is a network distributed set of resources that we coordinate using various hardware and software elements.

While eBay is no newbie when it comes to distributed computing, it also is embracing the cloud computing enthusiasm. The Industry Standard noted that eBay is now advertising for a Director of Cloud Computing Engineering, who will be responsible for “leading the strategy and implementation of initiatives, as well as the day to day engineering team management for the Cloud Computing initiative,” including “UI and SDK development for Cloud Consumers.”

eBay Seeking Data Center in Southwest

The giant auction service eBay is looking for a site for a new data center, and is said to be focusing its search on the Southwest, including sites in Phoenix, Arizona and Utah. The facility, which could be as large as 250,000 square feet, would continue a regional expansion that has seen eBay (EBAY) acquire a large data center in Phoenix and expand its facility in Denver. The company is believed to have six data centers, including facilities in San Jose, Sacramento and Austin, Texas.

eBay has 276 million registered users worldwide, and its web site serves up 1 billion page views and 26 billion SQL queries every day. It takes industrial-strength infrastructure to support that much traffic. But eBay has plenty of cash for expansion, as it has accumulated a war chest of about $5 billion in cash and short-term investments on its balance sheet.

eBay Pays $79K Fine for Generator Snafu

eBay Inc. (EBAY) has agreed to pay $79,200 in penalties to The Sacramento Metropolitan Air Quality Management District (AQMD) announced to settle an air quality permit violation. The penalty dates to August 2007, when the AQMD found that eBay’s data center facility in Rancho Cordova operated three standby generators for several days “for purposes other than maintenance or emergency use.” The district said the generator use resulted in a emissions (including nitrogen oxides and diesel particulate matter) in excess of the limits set by EBay’s permits.

“Bad air is bad for business and discharging harmful pollutants over several days carries a big fine when compromising the air quality and the health of our residents,” said Larry Greene, Executive Officer of the Air Quality Management District (AQMDO)

eBay isn’t the only data center owner facing possible financial penalties for permitting issues with generators.

PayPal Data Center Upgrade

How do you “upgrade” a data center running an e-commerce web application that serves 100 million customers? Verrrrrrry carefully. If you’re Paypal, you make sure to inform your developers and merchants about the maintenance window. The PayPal team is alerting partners that it is “planning to upgrade the PayPal data center” on June 18th and will take the site offline for two hours:

During this time, there will be a PayPal system-wide service interruption. The PayPal site and all APIs will be unavailable. You will not be able to process payments during this time. You do not need to do anything during the data center upgrade.

That is, unless you’ve hard-coded PayPal’s IP addresses, which are going to change during the transition (see the list of PayPal IPs for updates). The company didn’t provide details on what was being upgraded. PayPal is part of eBay, which averages 1 billion page views per day on its web infrastructure.

eBay: Scaling for 212 Million Users

How do you scale a web architecture to handle 212 million registered users and traffic averaging 1 billion page views per day? That’s the task faced by the web architects at eBay, who fine tune a personalized database-driven e-commerce site that manages $1,590 in transactions per second. eBay’s Randy Shoup and Dan Pritchett recently gave a presentation at SD Forum 2006 on scaling this massive operation, titled The eBay Architecture (link via Greg Linden). The talk walks through the history of eBay’s architecture, and provides details on the current version of the site - which spans more than 15,000 instances across eight data centers - and how it handles the scaling of databases, applications and search. eBay says it stores more than 2 petabytes of data, and that its global web platform handles 3 billion API calls and 26 billion SQL executions every day.

Findory’s Greg Linden calls the presentation “a very interesting talk for anyone who is working or wants to work on big websites and big data,” and offers an additional endoresement from Tim Bray said, “This ought to be required reading for everyone in this business whose title contains the words ‘Web’ or ‘Architect.’ ”