Hi all.
The Wikimedia Foundation has approved a grant of $40,000 towards improving the Toolserver’s reliability. With that money, we'll by three database servers, so we can keep two copies of each wiki database instead of just one. This should greatly improve the availability of up to date data in the wiki dbs.
A blog post with some more details is at http://journal.toolserver.org/entry/2009/07/29/wikimedia-foundation-grants-40000-to-the-toolserver/. You can find the original grant reqwuest at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_chapters/WMF_grants/WM_DE/Improve_toolserver_reliability.
-- daniel