eBay's Newest Data Center Uses Half the Energy, Aims for LEED Gold

SOUTH JORDAN, UT — When your business is global and entirely online, having a reliable and powerful data center is mission-critical, and energy efficiency can at best place a close second.

But eBay's newly opened data center here has managed to achieve high levels of redundancy while also using as much as 50 percent less energy than other facilities that it leases.

In a blog post on Data Center Pulse, eBay's Senior Director of Global Data Center Strategy Dean Nelson lays out what went into building "Project Topaz," the code name for what he calls "the single largest infrastructure project that the company has ever undertaken."

Picture that everything has a backup -- even the backups have backup. Now keep in mind that nothing is really 100% bulletproof, but in terms of a resilient data center, we have built the highest level possible.

Now, many think that when you build a data center with this much redundancy, it will be extremely expensive to operate and very inefficient. Quite the contrary. Besides running the data center operations for the company, I'm also responsible to pay the power bill. So, the datacenter must be built like a tank, be able to brush off major faults, lower our operating costs and be extremely efficient.