StubHub

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With its easy-to-use, convenient Web environment for buying and selling event tickets, StubHub has gained millions of satisfied customers, making it the world’s largest ticket marketplace. To make its business model a success, StubHub needed high-capacity IT systems that are able to connect ticket buyers and sellers, 24x7.

Until recently, a core component of StubHub’s e-commerce infrastructure — a back-end, online transaction processing (OLTP) system — was based on an Oracle 9i Real Application Clusters (RAC) database. The database ran on a 32-bit platform that included IBM x3650 hardware and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4. However, as StubHub’s business grew, the system had a hard time keeping up with demand. “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 early 2008, to handle sales growth, StubHub chose to upgrade the OLTP database to Oracle RAC 10g, and it sought hardware and an operating system that would maximize the new database’s performance. The company investigated systems from HP and IBM, including POWER6-based servers running AIX. However, StubHub decided that a 64-bit platform based on Sun hardware and the Solaris 10 Operating System offered more 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 in Menlo Park, California, to design and perform benchmark tests to select the most appropriate Sun hardware for the company’s OLTP solution and related systems. Based on these tests, StubHub selected the Sun SPARC Enterprise M5000 server for its combination of performance, scalability, and cost effectiveness. “The M5000 offers three convenient methods of scaling,” says Dougherty. “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.” 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.

StubHub is pleased with the performance of its upgraded OLTP solution. In the company’s tests under heavy load conditions, the 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.

These performance increases translate directly into better user experiences and business results. For example, 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. The company’s Net Promoter score (a 0-to-10 measure of customer satisfaction and loyalty) has risen by 3.5 points. And finally, the increased system capacity has allowed StubHub to sell more tickets, resulting in a return on investment in just three months. 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.”