Wikipedia standardizes servers on Ubuntu
The operator of the popular Wikipedia website has reportedly standardized its 400 servers on Ubuntu. San Francisco based Wikimedia Foundation, which employs five geographically distributed IT staff, and serves two million pages daily, says the move will simplify server maintenance, according to a report.
ComputerWorld’s Todd R. Weiss reports that Wikimedia began the transformation in 2006, starting with caching proxy servers. Prior to that, the infrastructure expanded “haphazardly,” with a mix of Red Hat and Fedora servers, Weiss wrote.
Weiss quotes market analyst Gordon Haff as saying the choice of Ubuntu may be due to its free and commercial versions being identical. Other commercial Linux vendors, notably Red Hat, offer added functionality in their paid products, Haff is quoted as having said.
