Yahoo! Store Infrastructure Improvements

Here in Small Business, we’ve been making improvements to our systems that we’d like to share with you. Merchants often ask about how we preserve their store data, and rightly so. In addition to regular backups, copying data within the primary data center, and replicating data to a remote data center in a different geographic location, going forward your store’s data will also be published to multiple data centers simultaneously. This has the following benefits:

• Similar to our image-caching technology, which uses a content delivery network, shopper requests for your store’s pages will now be served by the closest available data center to the shopper. This should improve page serving times and the overall reliability of shoppers interacting with your site.
• Should a major event such as a natural disaster occur and one data center becomes unavailable, the other data center can service all requests with limited impact to your shoppers. Previously a major data center outage would mean bringing the other data center online before being able to service requests.

We’ve also made improvements to our overall network architecture. Key benefits include:

• More than double the order-taking capacity for our checkout systems.
• Double the front-end serving capacity, allowing us to handle twice as much traffic to our page serving systems.
• Improved ability to quickly add capacity to handle sudden increases in traffic.

The needs of our merchants are important to us. We remain committed to continually improving our systems so we can meet these needs, now and in the future.

Sheridan Rawlins
Yahoo! Small Business