Server Decommission Donations

Translate this post

At this time we have closed submissions.  We have received well over 100 requests, and will not have enough servers to cover those, let alone more.  Thanks for the submissions!  ~ RobH @ 2011-06-18 @ 10:00 EST
Due to the overwhelming response, we will unfortunately not be able to reply to everyone on an individual basis.  If your organization is selected, you will receive an email from us indicating the approval, as well as shipping information. ~ RobH @ 2011-06-30 @ 13.30 EST

 
The Wikimedia Foundation  has  been upgrading and adding new servers to keep up with traffic demand and capacity growth as we always do. Recently, we replaced some of our older servers with faster, higher capacity  and more energy efficient servers.  These  older servers are now decommissioned and will be donated away. Do note  that they are over 3+ years old and are out of warranty.  While we may have placed a lot of demand on them  over the years, they are in fine working condition.
Most systems (but possibly not all) have the following specifications:

  • Dual CPU 2.5 GHz
  • From 3GB to 24GB of RAM, depending on role.
  • Most have 80 GB or larger HDD (some have two hard drives, some drives are 160GB or possibly even 250GB)

If you are interested, please provide the following information in your email to us:

  • Registered non-profit name and information.
  • Your contact information, including email address, phone number, and relationship with requesting non-profit.
  • Information on the non-profit, their charter,  mission  and goals.
  • Shipping address information for a FedEx Ground delivery (i.e., the shipment destination)*
  • How the servers will be used.  (We like to know and share with folks!)

* At this time we regret that we are only able to ship servers to USA based non-profits.  This is due to the cost of shipping and the various exportation laws and taxes that result from shipping internationally.
Please provide as much detail as possible on how you plan to use the servers. For example,   ‘Wikimedia will use these for our sites.’ is pretty vague where as  ‘Wikimedia is the non-profit foundation that runs Wikipedia.  Server donations to us would be used to run our websites that allow access to Wikipedia and its sister projects.’ is much clearer.
If you are not a registered non-profit, your use of the server(s) must be utilized in a fashion that works with or on the projects of the Wikimedia Foundation.  We are not donating these servers to private individuals for personal use.  All requests that are not for use on Wikimedia projects or are not going to a non-profit will be ignored.
By submitting and possibly accepting servers from us, you are granting the Wikimedia Foundation permission to publish details of the donation.  This is normally (but not limited to) a quick blurb about it on our Tech Blog (http://diff.wikimedia.org).
The Wikimedia Foundation provides no guarantee of the hardware donated in any manner.  Any use of the hardware is not the responsibility of the Wikimedia Foundation.
All requests will be reviewed by our technical team, and they will reply back regarding server availability.  Please keep in mind that these are handled on a low priority schedule, with our normal operations taking precedence.  There may be delays in shipping out your request, or we simply run out of servers.
At this time we have closed submissions.  We have received well over 100 requests, and will not have enough servers to cover those, let alone more.  Thanks for the submissions!  ~ RobH @ 2011-06-18 @ 10:00 EST
Rob Halsell
Wikimedia Operations Engineer

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

Can you help us translate this article?

In order for this article to reach as many people as possible we would like your help. Can you translate this article to get the message out?

16 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments

Excellent initiative!

One non-profit already applied and has been approved for some servers. Get those requests in!
Edit: Now two non-profits have servers going out to them.

Would these servers happen to have VT? I’d like to be able to teach virtualization with type1 hypervisors such as Xen and KVM, but would need VT or AMD-v to do that. I don’t want to apply for a server if I can’t use it.

These are older, and I do not think they have any virtualization support in the CPU.
Also: There were a few comments of folks asking for servers via the comments. The blog post is quite clear on how to get servers, so those comments have been deleted.

This is a very nice idea. Is there going to be a list somewhere of what organizations got the servers?

Why not just sell the servers on eBay and donate the proceeds? Seems like an admin nightmare with qualifying charities and shipping.

Is there any information of what type of disks these servers contain? SCSI? SATA? IDE?
Thanks,
Ron

[citation needed]

Selling them would require just as much shipping, and then we would have to be involved in an entire ebay process. These are not new servers, charging for them seems mean.
Ron: All the info I have overall is in the blog post. Individual hardware specs are not readily available. Sorry.

Joshua: We usually do a blog posting of the folks who get servers, so hopefully we can pull that off again this time.
All you folks who just got their comments deleted: The blog posting is very clear to submit it via email, and that you need to be a non-profit. So any comments asking for the servers and such have been removed.

If they donate, they can get the tax write off. Will save them alot of money that way… Much easier than selling them as well.

would like to know if schools are eligible.

As folks can see from my update, submissions are closed!

would like to know if schools are eligible……..

Excelente..

Guys.
Wikimedia are offering their servers only for NON-PROFIT websites, and for people who are currently living in the USA. So stop ask for server to make game communitys, or just for host blogs, that things can wait.