Home-cooked best practices

Paul Strong, a distinguished research engineer at eBay Inc.'s research lab, characterizes the situation by saying, "To move forward, we need to be able to map resource consumption with business value delivered." He goes on to note that accomplishing that goal entails tying the value of business processes, workflow and user interaction to sets of services and applications. Regarding the ability of commercially available SRM software to perform these functions, he adds, "Typically, you can't do this."

EBay is filling this void by creating its own SRM best practice through integrating some of its existing vendor tools. This has enabled the online auction service to map some applications down to specific databases residing in specific clustered server environments on large arrays. As Strong notes, however, this still only creates limited cost-to-value comparisons.

Less is definitely more for eBay, which relies on a "cookie-cutter" approach to IT infrastructure based on deploying the absolute minimum number of components, such as arrays, and processes, such as provisioning LUNs, volumes and operating systems.

"In order to make our environment scale, we standardize on a small set of standard processes that become well understood so we could have better leverage and strength in those relationships, so if there are problems, we can resolve them more easily," Strong notes. "Obviously, the fewer components we need to worry about, the fewer sophisticated management tools we need to care about."