Community, OSL and Sun Jump to Drupal's Rescue

Robert Douglass writes "Drupal asked for help and received a major dose of it. Sun Microsystems has stepped up and donated a Sun Fire V20z server which will be the backbone of Drupal's new server architecture at the Open Source Lab. Furthermore, over $10,000 in donations were collected in a matter of a couple days (thanks to all the people who responded to the previous /. post!), plus thousands more in pledges from groups like Apress and CivicSpaceLabs... looks like the community loves Drupal!"

Comments

Server overkill?

[afinn]

So the old server was a Pentium Xeon 3Ghz with 1 GB of RAM. This server wasn't even dedicated to drupal - I believe it was shared with approximately 20 other sites.

Now sun have donated a server with dual Opteron and 4G RAM. This alone would probably have been enough to host the drupal site wiht a serious improvement in performance. But they've also purchased 3 Dell 1850s with dual Xeons and 2G RAM.

Given what was serving the site before, do they really need all this horsepower? With the unexpected server donation from Sun, could the money raised have been better spent on something other than more servers?

Drupal Info

[Dakrin1]

Oh, and I was curious what drupal was too, the slashdot link doesn't give much more info than that it's a CMS, and drupal.org is down (looks like they haven't installed the new hardware in time for slashdot).

Here's the wikipedia with link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drupal [wikipedia.org]

Drupal is a content management framework, content management system and blogging engine which was originally written by Dries Buytaert and is the software used to power Debian Planet [1], Terminus1525 [2], Spread Firefox [3] and Kernel Trap [4], among others. Drupal is written in PHP using strict coding standards.

Drupal is the English spelling for the Dutch word 'druppel' which means 'drop'.

Though it started as a small bulletin board system, Drupal has become much more than just a news portal, thanks to its flexible architecture. Drupal has a basic layer, or core, which supports pluggable modules that enable additional behaviors. The modules available for Drupal provide a wide assortment of features, including e-commerce systems, workflow, photo galleries, mailing list management, and CVS integration. Drupal's taxonomy/classification module is especially interesting, in that it allows any content to be classified with a flexible tagging system.

Some of the more special roles that Drupal has filled include company intranets, online classrooms, art communities and project management. Many feel that Drupal's focus on user communities is what makes it stand out from its competition.

Re:New /. Feature?

[LWATCDR]

Drupal http://www.drupal.org/ is a content management system http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_management_sy stem and runs on a computer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer. It is written in PHP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHP which you can read more about here http://www.php.nt/.

Slashdot has now become "News for wannabe nerds".