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CTO says EBay to push for grid standards

13.09.2006
Online seller eBay Inc. is using grid computing to deliver services to its millions of users. Paul Strong, its chief technology officer, said the biggest issue eBay faces in its grid deployment is managing a shared infrastructure across its more than 15,000 servers. Instead of managing individual servers, eBay wants its system administrators to manage aggregations of servers or tiers of a service.

Said Strong: "That's where we are going -- we are trying to create tools that allow them to visualize the infrastructure differently, and tools that automate activity." But Strong said eBay must build its tools to accomplish this, which the company would like to change. In this interview, Strong explained why eBay decided to get involved in grid standards efforts.

You are building a lot of your own tools. You can't buy them? There are bits that we can buy. We use certain off-the-shelf components in our infrastructure but we tend to have to be our own integrator.

Based on what you have learned from your efforts, what do you think vendors have to do to help enterprises? If I'm an enterprise, I'm not going to buy from a single vendor. My data center is inherently heterogeneous and always will be because I'm never going to put all my eggs in one basket. If we want to get grid in the data center, we need the ability to have integrated solutions. In an ideal world, I would like to be able to buy solutions off-the-shelf and not have to be my own integrator because there's a very high cost to it.

Doesn't that require a lot of cooperation on standards? I believe so, in the long run. Obviously standards take time.

How mature are the grid standards? From an enterprise perspective, not enough to feel that one could build software that would stay the same through time. One of the big dependencies that a big enterprise has is you can't afford to depreciate or make something obsolete next year. So, if [a vendor] comes out with a product and it has a useful interface for provisioning something, and then two years down the line you come out with an upgrade for that product, you can't suddenly say I'm going to drop support for the previous product, [or] I'm not going to allow you to use that interface anymore because we got a better interface now, because I may have built a whole lot of stuff that depends on it. That's why standards take time, because everyone wants to make sure that when they commit to a standard, they are sure its evolved enough to be stable.