StubHub’s latest data move was truly a labor of love.
Over Valentine’s Day weekend, Feb. 13-16, more than 150 Stubbers put their dinner plans and roses on hold to move StubHub’s main data center from its Sacramento location to its new home in Las Vegas.
StubHub and its committed team of engineers and technologists already maintain a “four-9” reliability rate, and so expectations were high – necessarily so – for this move.
“These days, site availability and reliability is assumed, and the complexity of sustaining an environment with tens of thousands of daily orders is often overlooked,” said Marty Boos, senior director of technology operations for StubHub. “This was a significant global project that required round-the-clock attention, and ultimately resulted in an exceptionally smooth transition.”
StubHub selected the Saturday after Super Bowl Sunday as the move date because usually the week after the game is one of StubHub’s slowest. The NFL has ended, MLB hasn’t yet started, and the NBA and NHL playoffs are still several weeks away.
But this year, Beyoncé announced her “Formation” world tour on Sunday, Feb. 8, and StubHub faced the challenge of moving data centers while still processing approx. 50,000 orders per day.
“The teams made it look easy,” said Mats Nilsson, senior director of product and user experience for StubHub. “Under the surface, however, this was a marathon effort across our product and technology organizations that highlighted excellence in action. Our StubHub business will be better because of the advances enabled by this move.”
The data center move is an important effort for StubHub, and a key tactic that will help StubHub’s unified and app platforms achieve future strategic goals. In just a few days, technologists at StubHub quadrupled capacity, and paved the way for aggressive expansion, both on the domestic front as well as internationally.
StubHub technologists from San Francisco, Shanghai and Kansas City developed and completed the data center move. After only a few hours in the new Las Vegas data center on Feb. 17, StubHub had taken nearly 15,500 orders, resulting in more than $5 million in GMV. Additional back office systems, including Jira, Confluence, QlikView and others were migrated over the following days.