10 Terabytes of data
The ultrapopular auction/sales Web site continues its exponential growth and finds itself adding 10 terabytes of new storage every week. That's a lot of data.Holy cow! We've been running an ecommerce site for several years now, and we've got quite a bit of data, but nowhere near 10 terabytes. And that's just what they add per week? Wow.
Of course, I don't have an inside scoop at eBay. This was a quote from an eWeek article. But when I stop to think about 10 terabytes of data, then imagine 10 more the following week (yes, that's more than 1 terabyte per day), that makes me quickly realize we need a new word, because 3 years will top 1,000 terabyes of storage added. That's just incredible.
One other thing that seemed very interesting in that article and worth mentioning, was on the final page.
When it comes to handling all that traffic, Strong said the world's time zones provide a kind of natural "load-balancer."
"When we're busiest here in the U.S., that's generally when Europe [the second-largest region using eBay] is asleep - and vice versa," Strong said. "Although we have surges now and then, the natural divide between the two continents works well for us."
This seems very much like what I've thought about the US and our traffic in that peak times spread across 4 hours and don't seem to hit all at once. Theirs get spread out even more so, with the traffic coming from across the globe. I'd imagine we all see this effect somewhat on our websites, and it really is a blessing. Imagine if we had 4x the peaks and 4x the valleys... not pretty.
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Matt