Wikimedia to use $2M Google grant to expand data center capacity

Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization that runs Wikipedia, will use the $2 million grant it recently received from Google to expand capacity of its data center infrastructure to support the growing amount of traffic on its Web sites.

Besides expansion, some of the grant money will be invested into improving Wikipedia’s accessibility and usability. Most of the donation, however, will finance the infrastructure expansion project, whose details have yet to be worked out. The expansion will be the first major task of Wikimedia’s new CTO Danese Cooper, who assumed the role in late January.

“We expand incrementally as required to keep up with increased traffic demands, but we're looking at a more broad, long-term solution for growing to keep meeting those demands,” Wikimedia spokesman Jay Walsh wrote in an email.

The organization currently has about 350 servers housed in four data centers operated by Switch and Data, Hostway, EvoSwitch and SARA, Walsh said. The infrastructure is segregated into two groups: a primary set of servers, running the Wikipedia database, in St. Petersburg, Fla., and a secondary set in Amsterdam. Switch and Data and Hostway operate the US data centers and the European operation is delegated to EvoSwitch and SARA.

The foundation operates its own network, Walsh said.

This was the first grant Wikimedia received from Google, although the two organizations have a long-standing relationship, including collaboration on translating some Wikipedia pages into various languages.

“Wikipedia is one of the greatest triumphs of the internet,” Google co-founder Sergey Brin said in a statement. “This vast repository of community-generated content is an invaluable resource to anyone who is online.”

Wikipedia and other projects operated by the Wikimedia Foundation get more than 364 million unique visitors per month. As of January 2010, comScore Media Metrix designated it to be the “fifth most popular web property worldwide,” according to a Wikimedia news release.

The foundation relies on donations from individual users, but large companies chip in sometimes as well. Most recently, EvoSwitch donated more than €300,000 worth of in-kind bandwidth and hosting services to Wikimedia at its Amsterdam data center.