The Wikimedia Foundation is the organization behind the Wikipedia project. Wikimedia has big collection running web sites such as Wikipedia, Wikisource, Wikiquote, Wikinews, and several others. Wikimedia serve 10 billion page views per month. Traffic can reach 50,000 HTTP requests per second.

To serve all of those online requests Wikimedia decide to migrate its servers to the Ubuntu Linux distribution. As Ubuntu has achieved an unprecedented level of success in the desktop Linux market Wikimedia choose this operating system. With this step 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. With this migration Wikipedia will try to simplify administration of the organization’s servers, which previously ran a mix of various versions of Red Hat and Fedora.

The organization’s hardware budget to date is roughly $1.5 million, and it spends $35,000 per month on bandwidth and physical hosting. Wikimedia are financing only from donations. It is unique and interesting that technical structure of Wikimedia is managed by a small IT staff consisting of only four paid employees and three volunteers. Hope that they will succeed in this Ubuntu migration.

Tags | Installation, Linux, Technology News, Ubuntu, Web Sites