What Does eBay Buy? Storage.

How do you know that eBay is important? It's getting to be a verb. The only way to become a verb is to not only become big, but always be prepared to become bigger. Where does eBay put all their ones and zeroes? eWeek has an interesting look at how eBay solves their data storage problems:

Not many Web-based businesses have run into the kind of traffic and server-availability issues that eBay has experienced. "Our growth has just been exponential for 11 years," eBay Research Labs Distinguished Engineer and Storage Supervisor Paul Strong told eWEEK. "And since our job is to provide available, efficient, low-latency, 24/7 performance, we know we have a difficult job to do every day to keep the site running as perfectly as we need it to run." eBay's storage engineering team (numbering "in the teens," Strong said) utilizes 2 petabytes of raw digital space on a daily basis to run the site and store its data, yet has to add about 10 terabytes of new storage every week to cover new transactions, Strong said.

If you've ever wondered what eBay buys, this article is for you.