Wikipedia adopts Ubuntu for its server infrastructure
Chance Furlong
I wonder why they are still using Linux instead of Windoze.
Cuss and discuss as to why this is so, Windroids. Wouldn't that get
Ballmer's pink panties in a bind?
Wikipedia adopts Ubuntu for its server infrastructure
By Ryan Paul Published: October 09, 2008 07:40PM CT
The Wikimedia Foundation, the organization behind the user-driven
Wikipedia project, is in the process of migrating its servers to the
Ubuntu Linux distribution. Wikimedia's move to Ubuntu is part of an
effort to simplify administration of the organization's 400 servers,
which previously ran a mix of various versions of Red Hat and Fedora.
Ubuntu has achieved an unprecedented level of success in the desktop
Linux market, but the distribution has been slow to gain acceptance on
servers. Wikimedia's adoption of Ubuntu could help increase the
distribution's visibility in the Linux server market and demonstrate its
viability in large-scale deployments.
Although the Wikimedia Foundation is a nonprofit organization that is
primarily funded by donations, the organization's technical requirements
are significant. Wikimedia CTO Brion Vibber published some statistics in
the slides (PDF) from his presentation at the Wikimania conference which
took place in July at the new Library of Alexandria.
Wikimedia's entire collection of web sites, which includes Wikipedia,
Wikisource, Wikiquote, Wikinews, and several others, serves up roughly
10 billion page views per month. At its peak, traffic can sometimes
reach 50,000 HTTP requests per second. The organization's hardware
budget to date is roughly $1.5 million, and it spends $35,000 per month
on bandwidth and physical hosting. All of its technical infrastructure
is managed by a small IT staff consisting of only four paid employees
and three volunteers.
In an interview with Computerworld, Vibber provided some insight into
some of Wikimedia's technical challenges and discussed the benefit of
migrating the entire set of servers to a single distribution.
He says that the original Wikipedia site grew from 15 servers to 200
servers within the first 18 months. Replacing their previous mix of
distributions with a consistent and uniform Ubuntu solution has
simplified administration considerably for the organization. "We can run
the same combination everywhere, and it does the same thing," Vibber
told Computerworld. "Everything is a million times easier."
Canonical initially announced the availability of Ubuntu for servers in
2005 and has taken several major steps since then to boost its
popularity, including a partnership with Sun and several certification
initiatives for major enterprise software packages. At the Ubuntu Live
conference last year, Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth said that the
company will increasingly fund server improvements and also announced
Landscape, a server management tool.
Despite these efforts to push Ubuntu in the server market, Canonical has
had difficulty competing with Red Hat and Novell for enterprise server
marketshare. Some changing trends could, however, soon give Ubuntu an
advantage. Organizations are increasingly turning toward free,
community driven Linux distributions as inhouse Linux expertise becomes
more accessible. During a presentation at the LinuxWorld conference
earlier this year, 451 Group analyst Jay Lyman said that Ubuntu and
CentOS will both gain enterprise acceptance as a result of this trend.
Wikimedia's adoption of Ubuntu is a reflection of the distribution's
growing strength and popularity as a server solution, but it doesn't
appear that it will translate into revenue for Canonical because
Wikimedia will be maintaining its systems largely without commercial
support. Now that Ubuntu is gaining traction with large scale free
deployments, the next challenge for Canonical will be getting some
mindshare with enterprise adopters who are willing to sign up for
support contracts.
Making Megakat City safer one troll at a time.
Tim Murray
> Wikimedia's move to Ubuntu is part of an effort to simplify administration
> of the organization's 400 servers, which previously ran a mix of various
> versions of Red Hat and Fedora.
Well, yeah, but they're not moving from Windows to Linux, they're moving from
Linux to Linux, so to me it's not that big news.
Timberwoof
Tim Murray <no-...@thankyou.com> wrote:
But they didn't move from Linux to Windows.
There is something to be said for standardizing the OS used on lots and
lots of servers in one organization, and there are enough differences
between various distributions of Linux that their choice of any
particular one is noteworthy. It would be interesting to know why they
chose Ubuntu over the others. I tried Ubuntu once, but I wasn't whelmed.
Maybe things have changed.
--
Timberwoof <me at timberwoof dot com> http://www.timberwoof.com
People who can't spell get kicked out of Hogwarts.
Steve de Mena
> In article <0001HW.C5162D15...@216.77.188.18>,
> Tim Murray <no-...@thankyou.com> wrote:
>
>> On Sat, 11 Oct 2008 06:30:35 -0400, Chance Furlong wrote:
>>> Wikimedia's move to Ubuntu is part of an effort to simplify administration
>>> of the organization's 400 servers, which previously ran a mix of various
>>> versions of Red Hat and Fedora.
>> Well, yeah, but they're not moving from Windows to Linux, they're moving from
>> Linux to Linux, so to me it's not that big news.
>
> But they didn't move from Linux to Windows.
>
> There is something to be said for standardizing the OS used on lots and
> lots of servers in one organization, and there are enough differences
> between various distributions of Linux that their choice of any
> particular one is noteworthy. It would be interesting to know why they
> chose Ubuntu over the others.
Because it's *free* and the others are not?
Steve
Timberwoof
You mean Red Hat Linux and SuSe Linux? They're free ... unless you want
support from the publishers.
Steve de Mena
Red Hat server (RHEL) is not free. Neither is SuSe Enterprise Server.
They start at about $350. If you have links to free downloads that
work I'd love to have them.
Steve