Wikimedia Donates Servers to Local and Remote Causes
The Wikimedia projects have been running on the same commodity hardware for many years now and every now and then we decide to decommission some of our older machines. This not only allows us to free up space for new servers but also lets us use more energy efficient hardware.
While searching around for a new home for our old but still very useful servers we came across two linked organizations: northxsouth & San Francisco Community Collocation Project (SFCCP). Both of these groups help out their local and regional communities by using open source software to better spread information within various media spaces.
The SFCCP is active within the San Francisco community while northxsouth works with various Latin American countries.
Our donation of servers was happily received and I’m excited to report that they will soon be humming along and serving the public for a long time to come.
Tomasz Finc, Software Developer
An interesting course of events took place after I found out what WMF was doing with these servers.
There are two user groups with which I’m affiliated which needed new servers, so I contacted SFCCP and they were kind enough to donate a server to each of those efforts. The WMF might save energy by searching for WMF-affiliated user groups who could use donated hardware more directly, or perhaps make an effort to let such user groups know that they can contact SFCCP (if decommissioned hardware continues to be donated there) if they need hardware.
Although SFCCP does excellent work, and supports a number of organizations which are all worthy causes, it makes sense to me that the WMF’s decommissioned hardware should be used primarily by WMF-affiliated user groups.
Great to hear that we can get everyone to work together about this.
The majority of the work involved in this was the decommissioning and prepping of servers for hand off. Finding someone who was interested in them was extremely easy as I had met a member of the SFCCP at a local Non Profit Conference who had expressed interest in donations. Wanting to both help out both local/remote open source communities and keeping our first donation within San Francisco as simple as possible, I went with the SFCCP.
Now that we have some good guidelines and procedures about donations, we can look to see about expanding who we work with the next time this comes around.
how many servers have been decommissionned this year ?
This particular decommissioning was for eight servers.