Alibaba Group Company Alipay Adopts Fusion-io’s ioScale

Fusion-io, Inc. announced that Alibaba Group company Alipay, China’s third party online payment system, scaled its datacenter servers with the Fusion ioScale to support the equivalent of a world record 3.06 billion dollars USD in one-day online sales on Singles Day 2012, China’s largest shopping day of the year.

Alipay processed 105.8 million payments on the ‘single digit’ day of November 11, 2012 (11/11), with a quarter of shoppers making purchases from mobile accounts.

"Alipay’s outstanding success showcases that they are a world leader in designing e-commerce architecture to meet customer demand for flexible shopping from any screen," said Neil Carson, Fusion-io CTO. "The Alipay team delivers services that integrate payment seamlessly with the shopping experience, and shoppers trust they can securely use Alipay to quickly and easily make their purchases online. With Fusion ioScale products in Alipay servers, databases can respond at the speeds needed to meet demand even when breaking world records for one-day sales."

With a user base of over 800 million accounts, Alipay is a preferred online payment tool of customers and Internet merchants thanks to its user experience and rapid, secure service across screens from desktops to tablets to smartphones. In addition to the Chinese retail websites Taobao and Alibaba.com, Alipay provides payment solutions in China for more than 450,000 external merchants for online retail, virtual gaming, digital communications, commercial services, air ticketing and utilities fee payment transactions. On Alibaba Group websites alone, the Alipay infrastructure supported three times more Singles Day sales than the record-breaking one billion dollars comScore reported was spent online on Black Friday 2012 in the United States.

"With the speed and convenience of payment services like Alipay, Chinese customers are rapidly embracing e-commerce as a primary shopping channel," said Jingming Li, Alipay CTO. "Customers are also becoming increasingly mobile, as one in four made purchases on Alibaba Group websites from a tablet or smartphone this year, compared to one in six last year. Our team is very proud that even when supporting unprecedented traffic, our scalable architecture ensured customers could make payments for goods and services without delay."

Available in minimum order quantities of 100 units, the Fusion ioScale provides up to 3.2TB of ioMemory performance tuned for the needs of hyperscale environments. Alipay deployed Fusion ioScale in its servers to accelerate its Oracle and MySQL databases.