A Bytemark donation boosts reliability of Debian's core infrastructure
April 4th, 2013
Earlier this week, Debian started deploying machines for its core infrastructure services which will be hosted in a new data centre in York, UK. The hardware, generously donated and hosted by Bytemark Hosting, consists of a fully-populated HP BladeSystem (containing 16 server blades) and several HP Modular Storage Arrays (providing a total of 57 TB).
Bytemark's servers have relied on Debian since the day we
started the company in 2002, and it was always an embarassingly
good deal. We've tried to repay it through sponsorship of the
annual DebConf gatherings, and through publication of Symbiosis
(our own packages to make Debian easier for hosting tasks),
explained
Matthew Bloch, co-founder of Bytemark. While we can't match the unpaid
efforts of the project's thousand of volunteers, we're at least happy to be
providing such a substantial part of Debian's infrastructure. Debian's success
will continue to spur Bytemark's.
This significant hardware and hosting donation will allow the
Debian Systems Administration (DSA)
team to distribute Debian's core services across a greater number of
geographically diverse locations, and improve, in particular, the
fault-tolerance and availability of end-user facing services,
said
Luca Filipozzi (DSA team member).
Additionally, the storage component of this donation will
dramatically reduce the storage challenges that Debian currently faces.
Our plan is to move several storage-intensive services to Bytemark,
he continued.
It is only through donations of time, goods and funds that the 100%
volunteer Debian Project is able to operate the critical infrastructure
necessary to support its work.
Further details of which services will be moved to this new equipment
will be provided soon on the
debian-infrastructure-announce
mailing list.
About Bytemark
Bytemark
has been the UK's nerd hosting outfit of choice
since
2002. It has a history of building its own technology
including BigV, a new command-line cloud hosting platform,
and Symbiosis, a set of packages to make hosting on Debian
even easier. The company powers tens of thousands of
domains around the world, and sponsors hosting for hundreds of
important free software projects including Debian, LibreOffice
and XBMC.
About Debian
The Debian Project was founded in 1993 by Ian Murdock to be a truly
free community project. Since then the project has grown to be one of
the largest and most influential open source projects. Thousands of
volunteers from all over the world work together to create and maintain
Debian software. Available in 70 languages, and supporting a huge range
of computer types, Debian calls itself the universal operating
system
.
Contact Information
For further information, please visit the Debian web pages at https://www.debian.org/ or send mail to <press@debian.org>.