Wikimedia Moving Main Data Center To Ashburn, Virginia

hydrofix writes "The Wikimedia Foundation is preparing for the transition of its main technical operations to a new data center in Ashburn, Virginia. This is intended to improve the technical performance and reliability of all Wikimedia sites, including Wikipedia. The current target windows for the migration are January 22nd, 23rd and 24th, 2013, from 17:00 to 01:00 UTC. Since 2004, Wikimedia sites have been hosted in the main data center in Tampa, Florida, a location chosen for its proximity to Jimmy Wales at the time. In 2009, the Wikimedia Foundation's Technical Operations team started to look for other locations with better network connectivity and more clement weather. Located in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, Ashburn offers faster and more reliable connectivity than Tampa, and usually fewer hurricanes."

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Hurricanes?

[Bodero]

Tampa hasn't been directly hit by a hurricane since 1921. Not to say it couldn't happen, but I just don't get the 'weather' argument. I remember the reassurances from Amazon Web Services last year when the 'Frankenstorm [forbes.com]' headed for Virginia.

Ashburn

[Narrowband]

Also most of Ashburn is fairly new construction compared to other locations nearby and most of its power lines are buried... that probably contributes to it keeping power on when older communities in Fairfax and Maryland don't. I suspect also the choice of location may have something to do with proximity to others. UUNET (or whatever they are these days), AOL, Verizon, etc., etc.

Re:I'd rather heare they were going distributed

[Trepidity]

They do maintain servers in other data centers, in Amsterdam and San Francisco, and use them for offsite backups and read-only Squid caches. They don't live-replicate DBs to them, though, I believe due to the decreased normal-case reliability and performance that you get when trying to replicate DB servers between data centers on different continents. The architecture of centralized DB with worldwide caches performs a lot better and more reliably. But if the VA servers were offline for an extended period of time, they could fail over to the Amsterdam cluster.