Customer suCCess

taobao Huawei symantec oceanspace N8000 and symantec Filestore solution strengthen taobao in online shopping mall

Online retailer Taobao experienced such sustained, exponential growth during its first six years of business that its data centers could barely keep up with the need for storage and data protection. Individual departments attempted to meet demand by implementing stop-gap solutions that were often not sustain-able for continued growth. With the combined solution of Huawei Symantec clustered storage, Symantec FileStore, and NetBackup, Taobao has minimized exposure to the risk of 2 million USD per hour losses from downtime, and has room to grow for the future.

Building a better auction

When U.S. online auctioneer eBay set up shop in China through partner EachNet in the summer of 2003, the world was their oyster. Entering the largest potential market in the world with a recipe of do-it-yourself democratization and Silicon Valley business savvy, it seemed like a match made in heaven.

That same year, Taobao started its own online shopping mall. With no track record and little hope of market dominance, the company did have one apparent advantage over its entrenched compe-tition: free listings.

Now in just six years, Taobao has eclipsed every other retailer in China in transaction volume—online or not. And with this year’s predicted sales of $19 billion, it is even poised to top America’s Amazon.1

A day-in-the-life snapshot Taobao published on its blog carries the sales data for one day of busi-ness in September 2009: 781,922 household items, 656,648 articles of clothing and cosmetics, 496,807 pieces of jewelry, 138,245 small household appliances, 113,769 mobile phones and laptops. That day, the retailer sold 4.561 million items and processed 64,808 transactions.2

orGANIZAtIoN ProFILe

Website: www.taobao.com

Industry: Retail and Distribution

Headquarters: Hangzhou, People’s Republic of China

employees: 500 to 1,000

symANteC soLutIoNs

Data Protection

Storage Management

Why symantec?

· Integrated file serving and data protection capabilities

· Manage and access data from multiple points

· Consolidation of various platforms throughout company

Customer suCCess tAoBAo

An ocean of data

During that period of runaway growth, Tao-bao was struggling to keep up with demand. Like eBay, Taobao doesn’t sell any of its own products but instead provides the interface, online sales tools, and transaction processes for buyers and sellers. Since each item for sale has an accompanying description and photos, the amount of data coming in every day was becoming problematic.

Attempting to manage the swelling tides of images, text, and customer data, each Tao-bao department was creating its own solu-tion for storage and backup. “Everyone was creating their own control node, and there was never enough capacity because we’re growing every day. We needed to consolidate our data centers and develop a unified backup plan,” recalls Jiang Feng, the data-base product team leader at Taobao.

A scalable solution

To bring its data into a unified environment offering maximum availability, automated backup, and scalability for the future, Taobao turned to Huawei Symantec—a joint venture between Symantec Corp. and Huawei Tech-nologies, based in Chengdu, The People’s Republic of China. Huawei Symantec offered the Taobao IT team a combined software and hardware solution to position the company for continued growth.

With their evaluation complete, Taobao de-ployed a 1.5-petabyte Huawei Symantec Oceanspace N8500 Cluster NAS storage sys-tem with Symantec FileStore technology, a solution that enables consolidated manage-ment of backup and recovery, Dynamic Stor-age Tiering (DST), and data snapshots. A second Huawei Symantec Oceanspace N8500 was deployed in an active-active system, giv-ing Taobao servers access to a common, replicated database for failover.

The team also deployed Veritas NetBackup for centralized data protection. NetBackup is integrated with the N8000 with Symantec FileStore for simplified, faster backups.

The high degree of scalability of the com-bined solution was a major deciding factor in

the deployment. “It was very difficult for Taobao to make a storage plan for more than one year, as the business is growing so fast. Thus the central management and excellent scalability are very important for us. The N8500 with Symantec FileStore technology can scale up to 15 petabytes,” Feng ex-plains.

minimizing risk of $2 million usD/hour downtime

Selling millions of products every day de-mands maximized availability. Because Tao-bao processes all of its listings, photos, and transactions from its Web site, losing one minute of uptime can cost the company $36,000 USD.3 “We have millions of items going up for sale every day on Taobao, and our customers rely on our Web site for every-thing from uploading items to managing their billing,” explains Feng.

soLutIoNs At A GLANCe

Key Challenges

• Gain control over growing stores of un-structured data

• Enhance backup and recovery while minimizing disruption to production

• Offer maximum availability to growing customer base

symantec Products

• Symantec™ FileStore

• Veritas NetBackup™ with

– Veritas NetBackup for Microsoft SQL Server

Huawei symantec Products

• Huawei Symantec OceanStor N8500 Cluster

symantec services

• Huawei Symantec Gold Technical Support Service Package

BusINess resuLts AND teCHNICAL BeNeFIts

• Rapid scalability can accommodate exponential data growth

• Risk of 2 million USD/hour downtime losses minimized by replication

• Centralized, streamlined enterprise-wide backup and recovery

• Minimized risk of data loss

“The Huawei Symantec Oceanspace

N8000 with Symantec FileStore is

delivered with integrated Veritas

NetBackup data protection, which

enables us to have a unified, simple,

and policy based backup system

which will significantly reduce our

maintenance costs. We’re now four

times more efficient with our backups.”

Jiang Feng

Database Product Team Leader

Taobao

Customer suCCess tAoBAo

With a unified, high-bandwidth storage solu-tion in the new Huawei Symantec Oceans-pace N8000 with Symantec FileStore, the Taobao IT team is confident it can maximize availability. Because the N8000 with Symantec FileStore can be configured to survive multiple node failure by quickly re-distributing the workload across a cluster, service remains intact even if there is server failure within the data center.

Four-fold improvement in backup efficiency

The Taobao team also knew it needed better efficiency and reliability than its aging NAS system was providing, as that system re-quired backups to be performed via Network Data Management Protocol (NDMP). By unit-ing its storage and managing its business-critical data backups with Veritas NetBackup, Taobao can offer continuous data protection and replication while reducing backup time and giving IT the ability to recover to any point in time.

Using clustered network attached storage (NAS) powered by Huawei Symantec, Taobao now has a single, reliable data backup solu-tion across all its departments, while mini-mizing cost and complexity. “The Huawei Symantec Oceanspace N8000 with Symantec FileStore is delivered with integrated Veritas NetBackup data protection, which enables us to have a unified, simple, and policy based backup system which will significantly reduce our maintenance costs. We’re now four times more efficient with our backups,” says Feng.

A dynamic future

With its rapid growth showing no signs of abating, the Taobao team is looking to inte-grate additional Huawei Symantec product features into its environment. To further or-ganize its data based on how much the data actually gets used, the team will be activating Dynamic Storage Tiering (DST)—a feature within Huawei Symantec N8000 with Symantec FileStore technology.

Dynamic Storage Tiering will enable data to be dynamically moved to different storage tiers to rapidly respond to Taobao’s changing business needs. Frequently used data can be stored on tier one storage while less volatile data can reside on tier two or three storage. “Since moving data between tiers is auto-mated by N8000 with Symantec FileStore, Taobao will be able to set its own rules for data movement and use fewer resources to manage its trajectory as we continue to grow,” Feng says.

1. New York Times, Aug. 9, 2009, “An Online Market Flourishes in China” by David Bar-boza

2. Taobao Trends, Sept. 19, 2009, “Taobao sells 4.56 million goods a day”

3. 19 billion USD projected earnings for 2009 / 525,600 minutes per year = 36,149 USD per minute

Copyright © 2010 Symantec Corporation. All rights reserved. Symantec, the Symantec logo, NetBackup, and Veritas are all trademarks or registered trademarks of Symantec Corporation or its affiliates in the United States and other countries. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

“Since moving data between tiers is

automated by N8000 with Symantec

FileStore, Taobao will be able to set

its own rules for data movement and

use fewer resources to manage its

trajectory as we continue to grow.”

Jiang Feng

Database Product Team Leader

Taobao