StubHub, an eBay affiliate, and the world's largest ticket marketplace, upgraded a mission-critical, online transaction processing (OLTP) database from Oracle 9i Real Application Clusters (RAC) to Oracle 10g RAC. To take advantage of high scalability and mainframe-class performance, StubHub also moved the database from a 32-bit platform to a 64-bit platform with Sun SPARC Enterprise M5000 servers running the Solaris 10 Operating System.

StubHub serves concert and theater goers and the fans of the New York Yankees, the Chicago Bears and nearly 60 other professional and collegiate sports organizations, along with music artists and media outlets. The ticketing agency's goals in this upgrade were to support rapid year-over-year business growth; handle large peaks in online demand for popular events; and increase system reliability and availability.

StubHub's legacy database ran on a 32-bit platform that included IBM x3650 hardware and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4. The company was experiencing difficulties in keeping up with the pace of growth, however. “Our traffic can vary greatly based on suddenly announced events, and it’s hard to predict peak volume,” explains Bill Dougherty, director of site operations at StubHub. “For this reason, scalability is a critical concern for us.”

In order to provide that scalability, StubHub opted for a 64-bit platform based on Sun hardware and Solaris 10 that offered sufficient flexibility to support the company’s fast-growth strategy. Dougherty says, “With the Sun platform, I can choose one class of processor and server that optimizes my Oracle workload, for example, and a completely different class of processor and server for my application tier, but still have only one Solaris 10 OS code base to support. This flexible architecture uses IT resources efficiently, and its reliability gives us peace of mind.”

StubHub worked with the Sun Solution Center to design and perform benchmark tests to select the most appropriate Sun hardware for the company’s OLTP solution and related systems. Currently, two SPARC Enterprise M5000 servers support a two-node OLTP cluster, replacing the previous six-node IBM/Linux system. Seven additional M5000 servers support several StubHub applications, including development and QA systems, an Oracle 10g Enterprise Edition–based data warehouse, internal business and financial applications, and failover capabilities for these systems. All nine M5000 servers have the same CPU and memory configuration, with eight dual-core SPARC64 VI processors and 128 gigabytes of RAM.

Two Sun SPARC Enterprise M4000 servers, each with four dual-core SPARC64 VI processors, support the company’s development and testing environments. The company’s e-commerce platform is supported by a Hitachi AMS1000 storage system with Brocade 200E Fibre Channel switches.

Doughtery remarks that, “The M5000 offers three convenient methods of scaling. First, we can scale vertically, by upgrading to faster cores and more memory; second, horizontally, by just adding more nodes; and third, by partitioning the database and splitting the workload among multiple clusters.”

He has high praise, as well, for the Solaris OS, saying, " Solaris is one of the most stable, secure, and scalable operating systems available, and the SPARC processor line is second to none. Our Sun SPARC Enterprise M-Series servers combined with the Oracle Database offer rock-solid reliability."

In StubHub’s tests under heavy load conditions, its new system is able to handle 47,000 database transactions per second per node, versus the previous system’s 900 transactions per second per node — a 52-fold increase in volume. Similarly, the average response time per transaction is only 0.27 milliseconds now, versus 19.4 milliseconds before — nearly 72 times faster. What is more, StubHub achieved ROI in a mere three months.

These performance increases translate directly into better user experiences and business results that are reflected in the company’s Net Promoter score (a 0-to-10 measure of customer satisfaction and loyalty), which has risen by 3.5 points. Average web page loading time for users has decreased by 17.5%, and sellers’ price changes appear online almost instantly, eliminating a previous delay of several minutes.

Finally, Dougherty concludes, “This upgrade project was all about scalability and growth, and that’s what we’ve achieved. Our site traffic has more than doubled in the past 18 months. Without the new Sun platform, we would not be able to handle our high volume of site traffic.”

More Information

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New Configurations and Options for the Sun SPARC Enterprise M4000, M5000

Brocade Data Center Fabric Manager (DCFM)

Sun SPARC Enterprise Servers [...read more...]

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