EBay's approach to mapping applications to back-end storage systems is more of a process than a technology solution (i.e., as new projects are added to the site, the process determines what changes have to be made to the different databases). Wherever possible, these changes are grouped logically to a particular Oracle instance and given a handle. The concept is to divorce the logical host with a physical instance and provide operations personnel flexibility in scaling more resource-intensive databases away from less-intensive ones.

"For eBay, the issue is about scalability and managing growth, so implementing such a process was a must-have," Strong says. "This process may not make sense for everyone, but it has been crucial in enabling eBay to scale exponentially in a manageable way."

At eBay, chargeback is viewed as a nice-to-have capability that it has not yet realized. While the logical grouping model allows Strong's group to quantify and thus scale a particular function, it hasn't taken the step to actually assign that cost back to the business unit. But Strong is exploring ways to do that.

Overall, the resource-mapping effort at eBay is supported by both technical and business management, because it is viewed as adding value across the enterprise.

Strong says his IT team has told him that SMI-S looks like it could be very useful for managing heterogeneous environments at the "lowest common denominator level" but would be less useful in highly specialized environments requiring more detailed integration.