WMF needs additional datacenter space

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The Wikimedia Foundation is looking into the option of expanding into a new datacenter.  Currently the plans are tentative, but are expected to become much firmer once discussions with various Datacenter Providers takes place.
Currently, the servers for the projects reside in Tampa, Florida, USA, and in Amsterdam, Netherlands.  We actually have moved the servers recently in Amsterdam.  Now the time has come to move/expand in the US.  We are looking at moving to an area OUTSIDE of Florida, where every single hurricane season is not the cause of distress.
We are currently looking in the Virginia and DC areas, but are not adverse to other areas given the space/power/transit issues.  I have already been in contact with a number of vendors, but that doesn’t mean I do not want more options.
Things we require:

  • We are looking for Datacenters that offer co-location services with 24/7 access.
  • We also require racks have both primary and redundant power drops, from different feeds and circuits.
  • The drops also need to be 3phase 208V power.
  • Offers a low cost out of band access for our mangement network ONLY (no production traffic.)
  • Some kind of NOC in residence in the event of ‘horrible end of the world’ happenings and we need remote hands.  (We have LOM and remote reboot capabilities, but having a NOC is never horrible.)

Any interested sales folks at a datacenter can email me rob at wikimedia dot org.  Put ‘Datacenter Relocation Project’ in the subject so I am sure I see it!
Also, any folks out there who have decent recommendations, let me have em!

Archive notice: This is an archived post from blog.wikimedia.org, which operated under different editorial and content guidelines than Diff.

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hmm, so I’m not sure to understand.
Do you intend to move most of the Florida servers in the new datacenter, or will it mainly be used to store new servers ?

The new datacenter build out would be NEW servers at the location. We cannot really move existing servers, we need them to keep the site up and online.
So the idea is build out a new cluster. Make it good enough to run the site off, then we will have (for awhile atleast) two distinct, full clusters, either of which can run the site.
This would help for DR purposes as well as general expansion.

oooh redundancy potential. me likes ^^

aww, and here I was hoping for more decommissioned servers XD

Mike.lifeguard :

aww, and here I was hoping for more decommissioned servers XD

There still will be more servers decommissioned. Servers are decommissioned because they are too slow and require too much repair to keep online. (They also take up space more servers could run in that are better.)
So we will still be killing off older, slower, no longer reliable boxes ;] However, now that we have a blog, we can post when we do to find them good homes.

I run a dozen servers through The Planet. They have data centers in Dallas and Houston and I’ve never had a better level of support than I’ve had from them.