eBay's $2,000-Per-Second Data CentereBay's $2,000-Per-Second Data Center

eBay's new $287 million data center in Utah was built in just 14 months and is responsible for managing all transactions and revenue from eBay.com and PayPal.com, which in 2009 totaled $60 billion or about $2,000 per second. Maybe it's no surprise that two of the project's leaders are former tank commanders and West Point graduates. And don't miss the photos!The can't-miss descriptions and photos come from the overall leader of the project, eBay senior director of global data center strategy, architecture & operations Dean Nelson:

(And a hat tip to Rich Miller at datacenterknowledge.com, who's posted one of his typically insightful articles about the new facility.)

To say that eBay's Nelson has a bit of the showman in him would be an understatement-when we last saw him three months ago, Nelson was putting the final dramatic touches on the shutdown of an obsolete eBay data center, a process he described this way in our post, "eBay Kills A Data Center": "I reared back and drove an axe through the final remnant of this once complex, powerful and archaic beast of a data center." And that blog post has the photos to prove it.

But with the new Utah data center, Nelson's new blog post features photos of a very different kind: the opening celebration (including break-dancers, of course) as well as some examples of what happens when those tank-commander project leaders mentioned above confront challenging obstacles.

Nelson's post is also jammed with details and anecdotes and is must-reading for anyone involved in planning or running the type of high-capacity, high-efficiency data centers that are becoming absolutely indispensable to the global economy. Be sure to check out Nelson's story and photos here.