INDUSTRY

Sun Microsystems announced that eBay.com is bolstering its search environment with hundreds of Sun's new AMD Opteron processor-based Sun Fire x64 (x86, 64-bit) servers and Sun StorEdge systems, for better performance and energy-efficiency. The move comes in time for the peak holiday online purchase season on eBay. The core infrastructure provided by Sun connects a community of 168 million registered users worldwide, allowing them to trade more than $1,359 worth of goods every second. In its search production environment, eBay looks at ways to reduce costs and boost overall performance. Sun's newest industry-standard Sun Fire X4100 and Sun Fire X4200 servers powered with the AMD Opteron processor, and Sun StorEdge systems, help provide eBay a comprehensive technology infrastructure that can scale to meet the dynamic demands of the site. In addition, many of the most popular features in the Solaris 10 Operating System, including the Solaris Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) feature, can help provide eBay engineering staff with valuable insight into application behavior and overall OS performance. The Sun Fire X4100 and Sun Fire X4200 servers are part of the enterprise-class x64 server product line. These new servers can help eBay reduce costs, boost overall performance and scale to help meet their growing customer demand, as the servers consume about one-third the power, are one-and-a-half times the performance, and cost half as much as comparably configured 4-way servers from other server vendors. More information on the Sun Fire x64 servers can be found at its Web site. This solidified technology alliance is an important milestone in the eight-year technology and marketing relationship between eBay and Sun, in which the two companies have worked together to help deliver an enhanced user experience to eBay's worldwide buyer and seller community. "With 168 million users worldwide, we rely on Sun to provide a technology infrastructure that can scale by the minute to meet the needs of our growing community," said James Barrese, vice president, Systems Development, eBay. "Over the past eight years, Sun has partnered with us to provide hardware and software that helps power our site, along with the technological expertise that helps us better serve our customers." "Since its inception, Sun has been committed to developing and sharing the technologies that connect communities and fuel collaboration," said Ingrid Van den Hoogen, vice president of brand and global communications. "eBay has demonstrated how those communities can create new markets and drive economic growth, and it's no surprise that eBay puts Sun at the core of this thriving Network-enabled marketplace."