Blogs

OK, they aren't really deep thoughts so much as they are observations on the SLA assumptions made between provider and customer.

Earlier today there was a great back and forth on Twitter about SLA's and Cloud. Following are some of the associated Tweets:

@GeorgeDWatt
When SLAs are broken cash compensation may trump credits. It hurts more & if service is really bad may simplify exit. #CloudViews

@mthiele10
So much talk about Cloud SLA's. The real issue is how the provider measures outages vs. how the customer does. Penalties are immaterial.

Thoughts on the Term "Cloud" & All its Assumed Meanings

On September 15^th, I made the following rash statement on Twitter:

mthiele10Mark Thiele

We have to move past selling Cloud. Cloud is purely an infrastructure evolution, we now have to sell "What can we do differently or better"

Following are some of the back and forth tweets related to the above:

jayfry3Jay Fry

Earlier this week we pre-announced that Ebay will be launching another public Modular Data Center RFP through Data Center Pulse. This is the second round of the public RFP process. Project Mercury, which was the result of the first public RFP, will finish commissioning by the end of this month and will be fully operational by October. Today we formally announce project Quicksilver. Quicksilver is Liquid Metal Mercury that moves and changes very quickly. Besides the obvious play on the Mercury name, we picked this name because it represents the capability we are looking for in data center portfolio. How can we create a generic, flexible data center infrastructure that can move and change with our business needs?

As you will see, we are taking the public RFP to the next level. The video below gives more insight into the project by describing the Scope, Requirements, Process and Schedule. 

You can watch the project page for all of the updates as we go through this journey. My team, partners and suppliers have done incredible things in Project Mercury. I look forward to the next phase in our evolution as we execute Project Quicksilver. 

Interested parties, should email modular@ebay.com for more information.

Let the new battle begin!

Dean

Last month, we killed our first eBay data center. Don’t worry, it had it coming...

I arrived early at the eBay San Jose campus as the rain continued to drench northern California. I joined a group of lively eBay employees from technology operations, product development and IT on a bus headed to Sacramento. We were on a journey to put our oldest data center to rest. This journey had started over a year and a half earlier, long before I had joined eBay. At that time, an aggressive plan was put into motion. The goal was to consolidate the data center portfolio to decrease costs, increase our availability and take eBay to the next level of Operational agility. It was a lofty goal.

eBay, like many of the rising star Silicon Valley companies, had been in constant react mode to keep up with demand. They had amassed a data center portfolio that spanned three states and in twelve different data center sites. Eight years earlier, the Sacramento data center (SMF) was the first to be brought online as a disaster recovery location and it was supposed to be temporary. It quickly expanded to become much more than that. When the idea of shutting it down was raised, the feeling was it was too big a task, too complex and too costly to execute. It would be like rebuilding the engine of a jumbo jet while you were in flight.