Twitter makes major investment in IT infrastructure, hires eBay VP of Technical Ops Mazen Rawashdeh

Twitter’s VP of Engineering of Mike Abbott has tweeted the hiring of Mazen Rawashdeh from eBay as VP of Technical Operations.  TechCrunch covers the announcement.

eBay VP Of Ops Mazen Rawashdeh Moves To Twitter As VP Of Ops

17 hours ago

Twitter has confirmed that seven year eBay veteran Mazen Rawashdeh will be replacing Nick Heyman as VP of Operations at the 400 person strong company. In true Twitter fashion, the move was announced in a tweet by Twitter VP of Engineering Michael Abbott.

There are a couple of comments in this article.

All Things Digital also posts.

Twitter recently completed two data center migrations, with Abbott saying yesterday that the company could now look beyond its stability problems.

The company had let go of its previous Manager of Operations, Nick Heyman, in December. Heyman was a veteran of Facebook, Playdom and Zazzle.

For those of you who don’t know Mazen here is information you can read to find out what he has done at eBay.

Mazen gave a keynote presentation in Dec 2010 at Gartner’s Data Center Conference where he discussed eBay’s accomplishments.

Mazen Rawashdeh

Vice president of Technology Operations
eBay Marketplaces

Mazen is a technology executive with both Fortune 500 and internet startup experience. Mazen has been with eBay for 6.5 years and is responsible for eBay Marketplaces technology Operations. In his role,Mazen is responsible for the day to day operations of the eBay Marketplaces technology platform in addition to technology operations strategy, data centers, servers, databases, storage, data warehousing, and global network technologies.

In the past few years, Mr. Rawashdeh has led multiple technology initiatives at eBay which provided a significant reduction in data center power, footprint and up-lift in the eBay site capacity while driving the TCO "Total cost of ownership" down.

I was at Gartner’s Data Center conference and posted a blog entry with a video of Mazen.

eBay VP of IT Operations, Mazen Rawashdeh keynote at Gartner DC LV

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 16, 2010 AT 2:51AM

I ran into Mazen before he presented his keynote at Gartner DC LV, and we caught up as we hadn’t chatted for a while.  I sat up front and created a video of Mazen discussing the process change that eBay made to improve the performance per watt for eBay systems.  Sitting with the eBay team we were also able to catch up a bit discussing Olivier Sanche passing away.

Mazen does a good job of explaining what eBay did to change the behaviors in IT to be greener in the data center and reduce watts per transaction by 70%.

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Here is an interview with Mazen by TriplePundit regarding eBay’s Green Data Center.

eBay Builds State-of-the-art Green Data Center in Utah
By Kathryn Siranosian | November 13th, 2009 5 Comments

green-data-centers-bannerWelcome to UtahOnline auction site eBay is building a $334 million state-of-the-art, environmentally responsible data center in the suburbs of Salt Lake City, Utah.

eBay says this data center will showcase the best and most innovative thinking in green data center design, technology, construction and operation, and Triple Pundit asked Mazen Rawashdeh, VP Technology Operations, eBay Inc., to fill us in on all the details.

Triple Pundit: Does this new data center represent new capacity, or will it consolidate other eBay data centers?

Mazen Rawashdeh: The new center is being opened as part of a corporate-level, four-year  data center consolidation strategy that is moving us from a handful of co-located data center facilities – largely space that we rent from data center providers – to space that we own and can manage to the highest standards in both cost and environmental efficiency. In short, it’s a consolidation strategy. Our business model is unique; we know the rhythms and availability requirements that are specific to eBay’s platform. By designing an environment for our data and compute power – both in terms of physical data center, hardware and software infrastructure that goes into it – we can innovate and manage it in the most efficient way possible. The facility in Utah will host the core technology that runs our business – including the eBay.com marketplace, PayPal and some of our adjacencies, including StubHub.com and Shopping.com.