1999-08-06-19:32:15 Mohler, Jeff:
Ya know, I bet you could sell a LOT of Filers down road with Ebay tomorrow...
I've been thinking about the Big Picture here, and doubt Ebay could use any filers, at least not right away.
The fact that it has happened _twice_ means that they are infested with idiots somewhere, and didn't succeed in fumigating after the first outbreak; unless they don't have anyone with half a clue in their entire shop, I'd expect what has happened is that they have some really hideously broken design somewhere, and so much work invested in that broken design that they can't afford to try and redo things properly.
I have an architecture that I _Love_ for high-availability, high-performance server farms. I imagine anyone else who has had a happy website implementation experience could say the same, and their architecture might not resemble mine --- there's probably More Than One Way To Do It.
Netapps can play a role in such a setup, and doing something like eBay they certainly would if I were doing the design and implementation, but before you can make a role for something like a Netapp you have to have a basic architecture that's sound, and the completeness of their failure means that they've missed that.
_First_, get a WAN-distributable high-availability high-performance symmetrically-replicated server farm archicture. _Then_ assemble it, using known-good components like e.g. netapps, suitable wads of Cisco gear, etc. Deploy it colocated with one or more connectivity providers run by people who know what they are doing and who are honest (good luck finding as many as one:-). Then kick back and party. I am reasonably sure that eBay hasn't taken step one so far; the output of
(echo 'HEAD / HTTP/1.0';echo '')|nc www.ebay.com 80|grep Server
kinda tells the sad tale, when it succeeds in connecting at all.
-Bennett