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The Linux distillery How two of the world's largest websites use Linux for high availability
The Linux distillery How two of the world's largest websites use Linux for high availability | How two of the world's largest websites use Linux for high availability |
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| by David M Williams | |
| Monday, 10 November 2008 | |
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Page 2 of 3 Five.That’s right, it takes just five full time IT staff to run each and every one of Wikipedia’s 400 Linux servers. Featured Whitepaper
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Now, I don’t want to be presumptuous, but do you believe one single Windows administrator can maintain 80 servers by him or herself? What do you think the effort involved in distributing patches would be? Or, perhaps I should ask what would be the cost, if you chose to implement Microsoft Systems Centre or Symantec Altiris or other such big hitters? These servers perform a variety of purposes. There are the primary web servers, database servers and also caching proxy servers. The move to Ubuntu wasn’t effortless, and in fact Wikipedia broke this project up over almost two years. However, the results have been tremendous. Wikipedia’s Chief Technology Officer Brion Vibber said that everything “has gotten a lot simpler. Mass upgrades can be done more easily, and the data center can be managed as a unit.” “We can run the same combination everywhere, and it does the same thing. Everything is a million times easier,” he said. Some commentators online have criticised the choice of Ubuntu Linux. Make no mistake, though; there’s not been anyone saying Wikipedia should have opted for any version of Microsoft’s Windows server products but instead debate arose over whether CentOS Linux – a free distribution which is compiled from the Red Hat Enterprise sources – or other versions would have been a better choice. Nevertheless, Ubuntu or not, the fact remains that it is Linux which Wikipedia chose to run its server farm, spread over data centres in Tampa, Florida, and within South Korea and Amsterdam. Linux has proven successful for Wikipedia. They have enjoyed reliable uptime and performance. They have scaled as their article count and user base has grown. And importantly, for a non-profit foundation, there is no software cost for Wikipedia whatsoever. Can you imagine just how much a Windows solution would cost? 100% of the funding for infrastructure can be spent on hardware, bandwidth and server hosting. What’s more, huge slabs of administration can be scripted and automated in a fashion far easier and more elegantly than is permissible in a Windows environment due to the inherent distributed management that has always been an integral component of Linux, with servers naturally operating in a ‘headless’ fashion. How about Digg then? And what relevance does all this have for those of us who are mere mortal web site owners? CONTINUED |
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