Yahoo! Orders Wikipedia Hardware

Edit This Page writes "Jimmy Wales announced today that Yahoo! has ordered 23 HP servers for the Wikimedia Foundation. The three database servers are model DL 385, and will come with dual Athlons, 8GB of RAM, and 6x 146GB 15K RPM drives each. They will also provide rackspace and bandwidth. The announcement comes four months after Google's announcement of support, and two months after Yahoo's own. Google has not yet made their intentions clear. You can read more about the specifications of what will soon be a 100+ server cluster at the Wikimedia Servers wiki article."

Comments

Also!

[Raul654]

As I write this, our developers are switiching the entire site over to Mediawiki 1.5 (from 1.4), and most of the changes will make it run faster. So we're lowering the per-transaction cost of the software and increasing the server capacity -- this is a good thing.

Re:Also!

[Jon Chatow]

Because the devs and the sysadmins are one and the same (generally), and they like playing fire with fire. :-)

Seriously, "not recommended" is because it hasn't been properly tested yet in a large-scale environment; this is what is being done right now. If this version of MediaWiki works for Wikimedia, it should work for everyone else, too (barring the funny odd bits we don't use).

Re:required?

[xMilkmanDanx]

Just think of all the links that get posted in slashdot to wikipedia and it doesn't falter under the load. That and it's not just static pages, between building, rebuilding, keeping reversion history, indexing for searches and constant slashdotting...

FYI: Those Are Opteron Servers

[Anonymous Coward]

Not Athlon

Re:required?

[Jon Chatow]

Actually, no, bandwidth (I'll assume here that you meant "throughput" ;-)) problems are not significant, it's much more the actual server hardware. Wikis are very database- and CPU-heavy.

Re:South Korea?

[Jon Chatow]

'Cos Yahoo! offered to host them at their facility there, and our overall global reach has a bit of a paucity in Asia.

Re:wikihardware

[Vegeta99]

Also, in addition to HunterX11's comment, Wikipedia articles almost always have relevant links and sources listed. It's meant more as a starting point for research - it gives you a rather verbose summary of the information, and then points you in the right direction for more involved, serious research.

If you use it correctly, you won't find a better encyclopedia anywhere.

Uh, hardly ...

[dustmite]

RTFA - it is the Wikipedia guys who are holding up Google's donation, not Google:

"Wikimedia's planned facilities in Amsterdam (The Netherlands), Belgium, and Asia are not online yet, so it would be premature at this juncture to ask Google for something specific when we don't yet have good technical knowledge of what we will need in the coming months following the introduction of these new facilities. Google are eager to help us, and Wikimedia are eager to accept their help, but the Board want to be good stewards of donor money, and this requires them to move carefully"

Re:This sounds like

[Jamesday]

Yahoo was first, about a year before the Google thing Yahoo arranged some content linking. Then ON THE SAME DAY both Google and Yahoo agreed to provide hardware. The Google news leaked, making it appear as though Google was first when it was actually as close to simultaneous as these things can be. Each is being accepted and used in the order which works out most conveniently for Wikipedia.

Both Yahoo and Google deserve approximately equal kudos for being helpful to the projects. Thanks!

Someone mod this up.

[ta bu shi da yu]

That's a Wikipedia server admin that's speaking.