Case study
IT efficiency races forward in
eBay Inc.’s data centers with
HP EcoPODs
Highly efficient modular data centers are a key part of
company’s growth strategy
Industry
Online commerce
Objective
Meet ongoing growth in a highly efficient
manner.
Approach
Deploy HP EcoPODs and fully loaded server
racks.
IT matters
•Cut costs with innovative approaches to power
and cooling.
•Streamline the deployment of data center
resources.
Business matters
•Fuel business growth with on-demand
deployment of data center resources.
•Avoid steep upfront costs for brick-and-mortar
data centers.
“Our HP EcoPODs are very efficient—sub 1.1 PUEs.
That keeps our costs down.”
–Paul Santana, Director of Data Center Operations, eBay Inc.
Just as it sets the standard for online commerce, eBay Inc.
continually raises the bar for green data centers. That’s the
case with the company’s groundbreaking data centers in Utah
and Arizona. To drive higher levels of IT efficiency and flexibility,
eBay makes heavy use modular data centers, including HP
Performance Optimized Datacenters (PODs). These selfcontained IT environments enable the company to keep pace
with rapid business growth while driving down the costs of
data center operations.
Case study | eBay Inc.
Powering the world’s online
marketplace
Modularity meets power
efficiency
Every day, eBay Inc. connects millions of
buyers and sellers, enabling commerce on a
global scale. The company does this through
eBay, one of the world’s largest online
marketplaces; through PayPal, which enables
individuals to securely, easily and quickly send
and receive digital payments; and through
eBay Enterprise, which enables omnichannel
commerce, multichannel retailing and digital
marketing for global enterprises.
To achieve its efficiency and modularity goals,
eBay Inc. worked closely with HP and its
other technology partners to break through
the limits of conventional approaches to the
deployment IT infrastructure and the powering
and cooling of servers and data center
facilities.
On eBay Marketplaces, eBay has 128 million
users globally, with more than 500 million
items listed for sale. On PayPal, the company
has 143 million active registered accounts,
processing millions of transactions each
quarter.
To operate these platforms, eBay Inc. requires
massive amounts of computing capacity
spread over 14 data centers. To operate in a
cost-effective and environmentally sensitive
manner, the company requires the highest
levels of efficiency in its IT infrastructure.
Those goals were key drivers in the design
of eBay Inc.’s new data center near Salt Lake
City, as well as the company’s Phoenix data
center. Both make heavy use of highly efficient
modular technologies, including HP PODs,
which are deployed outside the boundaries of
the conventional data center. The roof of the
Phoenix data center, for example, holds three
high-performance HP PODs that drive Hadoop
computing clusters devoted to data analytics.
These data centers are models for
organizations that want to gain higher levels
of IT efficiency, drive down power and cooling
costs, and enable the on-demand deployment
of preconfigured data center resources.
“We worked with HP engineers to design data
center containers optimized for our racks as
well as HP’s racks, and optimized for power
and cooling efficiency,” says Paul Santana,
eBay Inc.’s director of data center operations.
“Our HP EcoPODs are very efficient. That keeps
our costs down.”
The PUE metric refers to Power Usage
Effectiveness, a measure developed by The
Green Grid Association. PUE compares the
amount of energy going into a data center to
the amount of energy used by IT equipment.
A PUE value of 1.0 would indicate 100%
efficiency, or that all the energy going into a
data center is used by IT equipment and none
is used for other functions, such as facilities
cooling and power distribution. The Green
Grid cites research indicating that many data
centers have a PUE of 3.0 or greater.1 By that
measure, eBay Inc.’s conventional data centers
are highly efficient, and its modular data
centers have been built with the goal of PUE
averages below 1.1.
“eBay Inc. designs, constructs and operates
some of the most efficient data centers in the
world,” Santana says. “Our facility in Phoenix
won several awards over the past year, and
we expect our facility in Salt Lake City to be
just as efficient. And we have a very high level
of operational efficiency in our traditional
data center facilities as well. We’ve driven our
overall PUE averages down to 1.53 and below.”
“We can buy two PODs this
year, and if business grows we Cutting costs with HP
EcoPODs
can buy three next year. This
gives us flexibility with rapid
The HP EcoPOD is a high performance,
energy-efficient, and turnkey modular
capacity deployment. Rather
solution. The container-style data center ships
than spending hundreds of
with integrated power, innovative cooling
millions of dollars to build out technology, powerful management and
monitoring systems. Based on a standardized
an entire facility, we can buy
design, the EcoPOD can be configured and
containers as we need them.” tested with an organization’s integrated IT
– Paul Santana, Director of Data Center Operations,
eBay Inc.
“PUE™: A COMPREHENSIVE EXAMINATION OF THE
METRIC,” The Green Grid Association, 2012.
1
2
solution even before leaving the HP factory.
Case study | eBay Inc.
The EcoPOD delivers compelling benefits
when compared with traditional brick-andmortar data centers. It offers third-party IT
compatibility, uses industry-standard racks,
accommodates specific rack requirements,
and packs a lot of computing capacity into a
very small footprint. The EcoPODs deployed
at eBay Inc. accommodate up to 44 industrystandard 54U racks, up to 4,224 servers, and
up to 1.44 megawatts of power capacity.
In round numbers, the EcoPOD packs the
equivalent of about 9,000 square feet of
traditional data center IT into a 900-squarefoot package.2
And then consider the extremely efficient
power and cooling. The EcoPODs use
innovative, self-compensating adaptive
cooling technology that helps reduce both
power consumption and the carbon footprint
while maintaining peak performance.
The cooling system in eBay Inc.’s EcoPODs
operates like a swamp cooler, using
ambient air where possible and switching
to evaporative water cooling when the
temperature in the PODs call for more cooling.
Keeping pace with demand
Values based on 1.3 megawatt of IT load at
5 kilowatt per rack where one rack equals 32
square feet; there are an estimated 260 racks in a
traditional data center.
2
“eBay Sets Bold New Vision for Powering
Commerce with Clean Energy,” eBay news release,
June 21, 2012.
3
While delivering great power efficiency, HP
EcoPODs makes it easier for eBay Inc.’s data
center team to keep pace with the growth
of the business in a cost-effective manner.
Rather than investing upfront in huge brickand-mortar data centers to meet the capacity
demands of the years to come, the company
can order a modular data center to provide
capacity that will be needed in the immediate
future. This capacity-on-demand model is
one of the keys to eBay Inc.’s strategy to drive
down the cost of computing.
“We can buy two PODs this year, and if
business grows we can buy three next year,”
Santana says. “This gives us flexibility with
rapid capacity deployment. Rather than
spending hundreds of millions of dollars
to build out an entire facility, we can buy
containers as we need them.”
With this just-in-time approach to technology
deployment, eBay Inc.’s data center team
can keep a close eye on the company’s
growth forecasts and order PODs to meet the
predicted demands of the months ahead.
“It’s usually a 12-week process to get a
container here,” Santana says. “Some of them
will come with servers already installed. Some
will arrive empty, so we have the space ready
as we need it. That’s one of the benefits of
the HP EcoPOD. It has space for 44 racks that
we can use however we want. It’s another
room—a room that we can deliver in three
months to give us capacity for our business.”
The PODs can be populated in different ways.
They can be fully loaded and configured at the
HP factory, or they can be shipped ready to
accommodate HP racks or eBay’s own racks.
eBay Inc. often uses rack ’n’ roll deployments
in its PODs as well as its conventional data
centers. In this new style of infrastructure
deployment, racks are delivered fully loaded
and ready to go into service.
3
Case study | eBay Inc.
Customer at a glance:
Application
Online commerce
Hardware
•HP POD 240a modular data centers (HP
EcoPODs)
•Fully loaded data center racks
Software
•CentOS 6
“We order full racks of servers that are fully
configured with the network gear, the servers,
the power distribution units in the racks,”
says Santana. “It rolls in, gets put into place,
bolted down, and it’s put into service within a
couple of weeks. It’s a very efficient way for
us to deploy racks of servers. We’ve had that
process in place for four years now, and it just
gets more and more efficient for us.”
A new approach to powering
the data center
In a natural complement to its creative
approaches to infrastructure deployment,
eBay Inc. is taking a creative approach to
powering the Salt Lake City data center: fuel
cells.
While renewable energy typically supplements
the electric grid, eBay worked with fuel cell
provider Bloom Energy to introduce the
world’s first data center using Bloom Energy
Servers™ as primary, on-site power. The Salt
Lake City data center uses 30 Bloom, each
generating up to 1.75 million kilowatt hours
of electricity annually, virtually eliminating
traditional utility grid losses.
eBay Inc. will use the Bloom fuel cells—
which generate on-site power 24 hours a
day, 365 days a year—to replace the large
and expensive back-up generators and UPS
components that are historically utilized less
than 1 percent of the year. The fuel cells are
powered by natural gas.
Each of the 30 Bloom Energy Servers will
generate 1.75 million kilowatt hours (kWh) of
electricity annually just a few hundred feet
from the center itself, virtually eliminating
traditional utility grid losses.3 eBay will use
the Bloom fuel cells—which generate on-site
power 24 hours a day, 365 days a year—to
replace the large and expensive backup
generators and UPS components that are
historically utilized less than one percent of
the year. The fuel cells are powered by natural
gas.
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“These are highly efficient power generators,”
Santana says. “We have chosen these as
our primary reliability source for each of our
containers and our building.
They have extremely high uptime, and they
will be backed up by our utility feeds here. In
other facilities, the utility provides the primary
source of power and onsite generators provide
backup power. We’ve changed that. Now
the most efficient and green energy source
powers the facility.”
Looking ahead
As he looks to the future, Santana sees
eBay continuing to demand ever higher
levels of efficiency in the company’s data
center operations. That was the attitude the
company took when it issued requests for
proposals (RFPs) for its Salt Lake City data
center.
“We’ve stretched many boundaries of what
was traditionally reasonable,” he says. “We
pushed the companies who were doing RFPs,
who were doing construction design. We said,
‘We want this thing to be efficient, we want it
to be modular. What we did two years ago in
Phoenix is no longer good enough.”
In this continuing quest to enable the growth
of eBay Inc. in a cost-effective manner,
Santana expects to make greater use of
modular IT and power resources.
“Containers give us the most flexibility, in
terms of both space and power, to be able to
grow,” he says. “We want to be able to match
the business demand as we see it coming up
and to grow in a modular fashion. Rack ’n’
roll is modular. The containers are modular.
Our power source is modular. So we’re able
to expand as we need, and grow in a highly
efficient manner.”
Learn more at
hp.com/go/pod
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4AA5-0068ENW, May 2014