Wikipedia has an unusual profile for a high-performance site. As a non-profit running the world's sixth-busiest web destination, The Wikimedia Foundation has historically adopted a frugal approach to infrastructure. That began to change in 2010, when the foundation made reliability a priority in 2010 and shifted Wikipedia's primary data center from Tampa into space within an Equinix data center in Ashburn, Virginia. The Equinix campus in Ashburn is one of the world's most wired Internet campuses, providing connectivity with hundreds of other networks and providers. The Wikimedia Foundation is now in the process of expanding its data center infrastructure with an additional facility in the western United States. What does Wikipedia's infrastructure look like? Here's a collection of photos from inside the Wikimedia facility in Ashburn, with photos by Victorgrigas (via Wikimedia Commons).
A close look at some of the servers powering Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that is the sixth-busiest web site in the world, according to Alexa. (Photo By Victorgrigas , via Wikimedia Commons)
The Wikimedia Foundation is best known for Wikipedia, but that's just one of the sites and services it operates and supports. (Photo By Victorgrigas , via Wikimedia Commons)
What does it take to run Wikipedia? Servers. lots of servers. (Photo By Victorgrigas , via Wikimedia Commons)
Some of the cabling connecting Wikipedia servers to networking and storage infrastructure. (Photo By Victorgrigas , via Wikimedia Commons)
Hardware from NetApp provides storage capacity for Wikipedia. (Photo By Victorgrigas , via Wikimedia Commons)
For more photos, see the Wikimedia Servers (2012) photo page at Wikimedia.