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Wikimedia Moving Main Data Center To Ashburn, Virginia

Posted by Soulskill on from the i-will-not-be-able-to-answer-any-questions-next-week dept.

hydrofix writes "The Wikimedia Foundation is preparing for the transition of its main technical operations to a new data center in Ashburn, Virginia. This is intended to improve the technical performance and reliability of all Wikimedia sites, including Wikipedia. The current target windows for the migration are January 22nd, 23rd and 24th, 2013, from 17:00 to 01:00 UTC. Since 2004, Wikimedia sites have been hosted in the main data center in Tampa, Florida, a location chosen for its proximity to Jimmy Wales at the time. In 2009, the Wikimedia Foundation's Technical Operations team started to look for other locations with better network connectivity and more clement weather. Located in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, Ashburn offers faster and more reliable connectivity than Tampa, and usually fewer hurricanes."

14 of 59 comments (clear)

  1. "and usually fewer hurricanes." by rueger · · Score: 5, Funny

    Wow. Talk about tempting fate....... some things you just shouldn't say out loud.

    --
    Three Squirrels
  2. Virginia weather by b5bartender · · Score: 2

    Remember when electrical storms in Virginia knocked out Amazon's east coast data center multiple times?

    1. Re:Virginia weather by craigminah · · Score: 3, Informative

      I'm just down the road from Ashburn and we were fine...no major power outages from last summer's Derecho or the earthquake other than traffic getting even worse. It was Maryland that got FUBARed from storms. They lose their power a lot across the Potomac but Virginia is solid.

    2. Re:Virginia weather by oodaloop · · Score: 2

      Uh, I'm also right down the road from Ashburn and we were without power in most of my city for about 5 days. As I remember, about 7 million people in Virginia were without power.

      --
      Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
  3. Hurricanes? by Bodero · · Score: 3, Informative

    Tampa hasn't been directly hit by a hurricane since 1921. Not to say it couldn't happen, but I just don't get the 'weather' argument. I remember the reassurances from Amazon Web Services last year when the 'Frankenstorm' headed for Virginia.

    1. Re:Hurricanes? by dr2chase · · Score: 2

      Lightning (especially Florida lightning -- higher frequency AND higher currents) makes Florida special for two reasons. #1, though we can mitigate power failures, it's not a risk-free operation; increase the rate of power failures, and sooner or later there will be a mistake. #2, if the lightning actually hits your facility all bets are off, and lightning strikes buildings at a decent rate (my parents' house got struck every couple of years when I was a kid -- it was on high ground) and hit my in-laws in Tampa at least once. Once it hits, you get random electrical violence -- in one memorable strike, it got in the fuse box, and blew screw-in fuses straight out of their sockets hard enough to dent the door and knock it off its hinges. Also took out the compressor on a freezer with fish in it, discovered two weeks later.

      To make me certain of surviving a strike, I'd want a beefy Faraday cage with power supplied through a motor-generator with a non-conductive transfer shaft. Cooling water would need to traverse an air gap on entry and exit.

  4. Ashburn by Narrowband · · Score: 4, Informative

    Also most of Ashburn is fairly new construction compared to other locations nearby and most of its power lines are buried... that probably contributes to it keeping power on when older communities in Fairfax and Maryland don't. I suspect also the choice of location may have something to do with proximity to others. UUNET (or whatever they are these days), AOL, Verizon, etc., etc.

  5. I'd rather heare they were going distributed by Bruce+Perens · · Score: 2

    No one location is safe from natural or human disasters. So, I'd rather hear that they were going to a more distributed architecture and that they'd be able to sustain a complete loss of one data center.

    --
    Bruce Perens.
    1. Re:I'd rather heare they were going distributed by Trepidity · · Score: 5, Informative

      They do maintain servers in other data centers, in Amsterdam and San Francisco, and use them for offsite backups and read-only Squid caches. They don't live-replicate DBs to them, though, I believe due to the decreased normal-case reliability and performance that you get when trying to replicate DB servers between data centers on different continents. The architecture of centralized DB with worldwide caches performs a lot better and more reliably. But if the VA servers were offline for an extended period of time, they could fail over to the Amsterdam cluster.

      --
      10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
  6. Re:Huh. That doesn't raise any flags at all. by evafan76 · · Score: 2

    Virginia, huh? Hmm... What else could be in Virginia, I wonder...?

    No one, really. Just the CIA, the Pentagon, a lot of the Federal Bureaucracy (although much of it is moving back into D.C.), The FBI Academy, lots of Military Bases, most of the Government Contractors, etc.

  7. As a Northern Virginia resident... by evafan76 · · Score: 2

    ...I have absolutely no idea why anybody outside of the Federal Sector would want their data center in this area. We get Severe Weather (Tropical Storms and Snow Storms) on a semi-regular basis, and traffic tends to jam with a slight dusting of snow or a moderate rain to the point where it can take 3 hours to drive 2 miles, and the Utility Companies are not always the greatest at keeping the power running during these times. Neither of these things can be good for maximizing uptime and minimizing downtime.

  8. Policies based on U.S. law by tepples · · Score: 2

    A lot of Wikimedia wikis' policies are based on United States law. The applicable laws differ from country to country. Case in point: Copyright terms for some works are longer in Sweden than in the United States. For example, copyright in any work published before 1978 and more than 25 years before the author's death expires in the United States before Sweden or other EU countries. Putting a datacenter in Sweden would affect which images could be declared public domain on Commons based on its practice of using the later of copyright expiry in the datacenter's country and in the country of the work's first publication.

  9. Re:DC will get hit this year and there data center by chill · · Score: 2

    You forgot the plague of stink bugs.

    --
    Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
  10. Conveniently located near CIA headquarters by Animats · · Score: 2

    A surprisingly large number of key data centers and control points have been relocated to locations in Northern Virginia near CIA HQ. AOL is there. The Iridium satellite control center is there. (It used to be in Schaumburg, IL, near Motorola HQ) Ashburn alone has four Equnix colo facilities, two AT&T data centers, two Net2EZ facilities, and a few other major centers.

    A few miles away in Vienna, VA, even closer to CIA HQ in McLean and less than a mile from "Liberty Crossing" (Homeland Security HQ) there are six more big data centers.