Eweek has a long interview
with Marty Abbott, SVP of technology at eBay, who walks us through
their online operations. Among other things, he explains how the
backend databases evolved over the last five years:
“We went from one huge back-end system and four or five
very large search databases. Search used to update in 6 to 12 hours
from the time frame in which someone would place a bid or an item for
sale. Today, updates are usually less than 90 seconds. The front end in
October '99 was a two-tiered system with [Microsoft Corp.] IIS
[Internet Information Services] and ISAPI [Internet Server API]. The
front ends were about 60 [Windows] NT servers. Fast-forward to today.
We have 200 back-end databases, all of them in the 6- to 12-processor
range, as opposed to having tens of processors before. Not all those
are necessary to run the site. We have that many for disaster recovery
purposes and for data replication.”