Daniel Mayer wrote:
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Budget/2005
I’d really like to have a general idea on what we want to buy soon and if that can be bought before the end of the quarter in 2 weeks, then that’d make accounting a bit easier for me :).
So, what do we want to buy?
One more consideration: if Wikimedia is going to have lots of third-party squid sites popping up in the near future, it will make sense to ensure that all new machines are appropriate for Apache operation, as the relative need for local squid servers may actually reduce as a proportion of overall Florida operations, and at the same time third-party squids will put ever more load on central Apache operations, until the overall system can be made more full distributed.
I'm assuming the plan goes something like this:
1 add 3rd party offsite squids around the world
2 start doing offsite Apache rendering, too
3 start doing offsite read-only DB mirrors, with the central writable DB still in Florida
4 global distributed everything...
with stage 1 coming real soon now (already there, in Paris), and stages 2/3 following by the end of the year? Stage 4 is probably a far future thing, as it will probably require big architectural advances in open source DBs, as well as concerns about jurisdiction over the data. (eg Florida law applies at the moment).
Oh, it also might make sense to consider purchasing some (inexpensive) Netscreen or similar high-speed hardware-based crypto VPN boxes for use in stage 2 or beyond, so you can basically just extend your core internal VPN to offsite farms whilst still keeping your internal services network separate from the public Internet. I know some people who are experts in doing this who might be able to volunteer some advice.
-- Neil