Moving to ultra-reliable, DR-ready storage

Based in Seoul, South Korea, eBay Japan’s IT infrastructure team operates and manages the infrastructure that underpins eBay Japan’s e-commerce services for the Japanese market. The team also supports Korean sellers on the marketplace, helping them onboard, operate smoothly, and grow their business in Japan. By combining robust infrastructure operations with dedicated seller support, the Seoul-based IT team plays a critical role in enabling continued growth in Japan’s e-commerce market.

A subsidiary of eBay Inc., eBay Japan supports sellers in Japan with domestic and overseas sales. Through its sister platform Qoo10.jp, the company also aims to empower sellers in South Korea and beyond to access the Japanese market. 

YoungMin In, Team Manager of the In-System Team at eBay Japan, says: “We’ve seen a significant rise in customers seeking K-fashion, K-beauty, and K-food products. This surge in demand has driven more traffic to our platform and created even greater opportunities to connect Korean sellers with Japanese shoppers.”

As demand for Korean products has grown, so has eBay Japan. The company is expanding by around 20% quarter-on-quarter, and with e-commerce penetration in Japan below 10%, there are major opportunities to build the business further. eBay Japan continues to strengthen its event-driven commerce capabilities to capitalize on these growth opportunities.

“We see AI-driven personalization as a powerful way to win new customers and foster their long-term loyalty,” continues YoungMin In. “To maximize conversion during big retail events such as ‘Time Sale’ and ‘Mega Wari,’ it’s crucial that our e-commerce platform is highly available and responsive.”

Within eBay Japan, a dedicated infrastructure group based in South Korea is responsible for overall technical and operational support for eBay Japan, while also serving as a strategic bridge empowering Korean sellers to enter and expand into the eBay Japan marketplace. But as its existing storage platform aged, core databases and other key business services started to feel the strain.

“During major promotions like Mega Wari, there was always the risk that storage bottlenecks would disrupt the customer journey, potentially leading buyers to abandon their carts,” explains YoungMin In. “To mitigate that risk, we decided to do a root-and-branch refresh of our storage environment.”

In parallel, eBay Japan saw an opportunity to transform its approach to data resilience. YoungMin In adds: “Our legacy storage environment was making it extremely challenging to meet our recovery time and point objectives. We decided to reassess our entire infrastructure strategy, particularly around business continuity and disaster recovery.”

After putting Everpure FlashArray//X50 to the test during a rigorous proof-of-concept exercise, eBay Japan decided to move ahead with an immediate deployment. The company replaced its legacy storage infrastructure in South Korea with a new high-performance solution, built on the Everpure Platform.

“We deployed two geographically separate Everpure FlashArray//X50 solutions in a high availability configuration using ActiveCluster™,” says YoungMin In. “With asynchronous replication between our primary and disaster recovery environments, we enable near-continuous service even in the unlikely event that one site goes down. As a result, our disaster recovery environment is no longer just a backup system, but a fully operational environment capable of maintaining near-production performance levels.”

The Everpure Advanced Services and Business-Critical Services (BCS) teams helped design and implement the environment in line with eBay Japan’s recovery point objective (RPO) and RTO targets, and supported DR failover simulations based on peak-event conditions to verify that post-recovery performance would match production.

YoungMin In adds: “The Everpure team was instrumental in designing an environment that delivered on our demanding RPO and RTO targets.”

With Evergreen//Forever™, eBay Japan can flexibly scale out and upgrade its storage infrastructure without disruption or data migrations.

“Evergreen//Forever allows us to ensure our storage environment stays modern and performant without the cost and risk of hardware refreshes,” confirms YoungMin In.

Offering proven performance and reliability, the Everpure Evergreen® Architecture and Evergreen//Forever subscription give eBay Japan the ideal foundation to build active-active DR data centers in the future. This will help ensure that both production and DR storage systems deliver top-tier performance without ever reaching end of support.

Since starting its journey with Everpure more than seven years ago, eBay Japan has never looked back. Today, the company operates more than 20 Everpure FlashArray//X™, FlashArray//E™, and FlashArray//C™ systems, helping it deliver high-quality customer experiences even during peak retail periods.

“When we deployed our first two Everpure FlashArray solutions, we saw instant improvements in performance,” says YoungMin In. “During peak periods such as Mega Wari, storage latency has dropped by a factor of ten—down to just 1ms today. Building on those excellent results, we’ve steadily expanded our footprint with additional arrays to cover staging, ransomware protection, and backup use cases.”

He adds: “Even though we now have more than 6PB of effective storage capacity, we’ve actually cut our rack footprint in the data center by 50%.”

Partnering with Everpure allows eBay Japan to continually enhance availability and data resilience. The company has boosted storage uptime from around 90% to 99.9999% and slashed its RTO from around seven days to as little as 10 minutes. Using Everpure SDKs and APIs, routine maintenance tasks such as snapshot creation are fully automated, which eliminates a great deal of repetitive work.

“With asynchronous replication from Everpure, we are meeting our aggressive recovery targets without impacting performance in our production environment,” comments YoungMin In.

With Evergreen//Forever and support from Everpure Advanced Services, eBay Japan lets tasks such as upgrades and DR testing fade into the background—allowing its own IT personnel to focus on service innovation.

“We’ve cut the time spent on IT management and maintenance from one day a week to just 10 minutes a week,” confirms YoungMin In. “Nondisruptive upgrades via Evergreen//Forever, together with support from Everpure Advanced Services, have empowered us to maintain consistent performance even as our business grows.”

eBay Japan’s relationship with Everpure is now closer than ever. In the next phase of the multi-year partnership, Everpure will help the company build an even more robust and resilient DR capability.

“We’re now working with Everpure to enable an active-active architecture, which will effectively reduce our RPO to zero,” says YoungMin In. “Everpure Advanced Services will play a key role in this new project. Their Business-Critical Services team will help us streamline the monitoring and management of our environment and be a single point of contact in the event of a critical issue.”

YoungMin In concludes: “Everpure has proved their worth time and again through the quality of their solutions and the dedication of their people. Everpure served us with the same level of dedication and commitment back when we had just two systems as they do now that we have more than 20 FlashArrays. Reliability, trust, and responsiveness are what truly set Everpure apart from the rest.”