Google Gift Means More Servers for Wikipedia

The Wikimedia Foundation, which has mastered the art of running one of the world’s busiest web sites on a lightweight infrastructure, will use a $2 million grant from Google to expand its data centers.

The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that runs Wikipedia, houses its entire infrastructure on about 350 servers in data centers in Florida and Amsterdam. The grant from Google, which can spend more than half a billion dollars on a single data center, will help beef up Wikipedia’s back end.

Wikimedia’s spokesman Jay Walsh said that expanding the foundation’s data centers will be the first task facing new CTO Danese Cooper. “We expand incrementally as required to keep up with increased traffic demands, but we’re looking at a more broad, long-term solution for growing to keep meeting those demands,” Walsh told DataCenterDynamics.

The Wikipedia site is hosted on about 300 servers in a primary data center in Tampa, Fla., and another 50 servers at the EvoSwitch data center in Amsterdam that provide content storage and delivery.