The Wikimedia Foundation, the operator of popular online encyclopaedia Wikipedia, has signed a deal with Sun Microsystems to develop the foundation's Web infrastructure.
Wikipedia runs about 300 servers in Florida, 26 in Amsterdam, and 23 in Yahoo's Korean hosting facility. However, it is unclear whether any of these are already Sun systems.
The primary servers run MySQL, Sun's open source database package; Squid, a caching daemon; as well as load balancers and some Apache servers, with open source Web application software.
An overview of the Wikipedia's server architecture can be found here.
According to online research house eBusiness Knowledge, Wikimedia's most popular site during the month of October received over 41 million visitors, with 75.5 million inbound links. Online ranking services place the site in the top 10 globally accessed.
Sun Microsystems will collaborate with the company to scale the architecture, using Sun Fire x4500 and x4150 servers and Sun StorageTek storage arrays. According to Sun, the new platform will enable Wikipedia users to upload files of up to 100MB.
“Wikipedia needed a storage and server platform that can handle the ever-evolving needs of a growing, global community that currently sees more than 10 billion page views per month,” says Juan Carlos Soto, VP of cloud computing and developer platforms marketing, Sun Microsystems.
Sun Fire X4500 storage server uses a four-way x64 server and the highest storage density available from Sun, with up to 48TB of rack space, and uses the Solaris operating system to manage data. The Sun Fire x4150 server is a two-socket x64 server in a single rack unity.
“By implementing Sun's open source MySQL database and Sun Open Storage infrastructure, we are in a position to create a better and faster user experience. This is critical to an organisation like ours. We rely on users to collaboratively collect and develop the educational content, which we disseminate,” says deputy director of the Wikimedia Foundation Erik M"oller.
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