And it seems the data center is overdue. The foundation’s primary Internet property, Wikipedia, suffered an outage on July 4 which shut the site’s server down for about an hour. The foundation later reported that the outage was due to a power failure at its Florida data center.
The foundation stated in its business plan that its No. 1 priority for 2010-11 would be to build a technological platform that would enable Wikimedia to function as a top global Internet organization. “Our projects are vulnerable to primary data center failure,” it states in the annual plan. “We will build out a second data center to enable safe failover in the case of disaster.
"We will also increase uptime by improving site monitoring, capacity planning and operations response.”
In addition to the July 4 outage, Wikipedia suffered an outage in March when its European data center, located in Amsterdam, encountered a problem with overheating. Operators attempted to initiate a failover to the Florida data center, but the operation failed and Wikipedia went offline.
The foundation has budgeted about $2.5 million for the second U.S. data center, out of an annual budget of about $20.4 million. In addition, the foundation will invest in increased bandwidth for all data centers and add five new staff, for a total related spending of $3.8 million.
The foundation did not specify where the new data center would be built.
Be the first to comment on this post using the section below.