Q&A: Utility storage helps Priceline achieve high availability

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July 18, 2005 (Storage Networking World) -- Ron Rose is the CIO at e-commerce giant Priceline.com. He recently spoke with SNW Online about the company's deployment of S400 Fibre Channel-attached block-level storage arrays from 3PAR in an effort to streamline Priceline's system, expedite technology deployments and realize a substantial ROI.
Let's start out by talking about your overall IT infrastructure. We have hundreds of both Windows- and Linux-based servers in our Web and middle tiers, and we have about 160 Sun servers, many of which are database servers running Oracle. We are an extremely high-availability shop when it comes to e-commerce. Regularly over the past four years, we have been one of the most available e-commerce sites as measured by Keynote Systems in e-commerce.
So folks are always asking me, what are the disciplines and systems and measures that you have taken to get Priceline to be one of the more highly available sites, even though it also is one of the sites that has gone through a fairly high velocity of business-driven enhancements?
How busy is your change environment? We do between 100 and 200 software-oriented deploys per month, so Priceline does operate at a fairly high rate of change. And when software is in a state of flux, you have to have very good architectural disciplines to keep your availability extremely high. One of the things we did to help us in this regard is that we got very good about our storage approaches. We have always been a big believer in SANs, and when we came across the 3PAR and utility storage story, we are now both a big believer in SANs and a big believer in the 3PAR type of approach as well.
Specifically describe your storage infrastructure. We have been running modular arrays, which are typically one or more arrays that are hooked up to any one system. As a result, when we were looking into storage, we asked ourselves, depending on the size of the database and the performance that was needed, do we put our database onto the Fibre Channel module storage with one or more arrays? For the lower-end boxes, we have been installing our external storage onto SCSI-attached arrays, so one of the motivators with moving into our new environment was to find an architecture that would host both of those.
We had a few basic goals. They included finding a new storage approach that was more flexible, that made re-provisioning easier and dynamic, and that would lower storage utilization. We found with most SANs that you end up with duplicate data that you don't need to have, so we tried to minimize the Fibre Channel disks, which are more expensive than the SATA drives.

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