The Debian Project has announced that Bytemark Hosting has donated a fully populated 16 server blade HP BladeSystem with HP Modular Storage Arrays containing 57TB of storage. The new server, which will make its home at Bytemark’s new data centre in York, is said to be worth £150,000 per annum in commercial terms. Bytemark said that they have relied on Debian on their servers since they started the company in 2002 and said it “was always an embarrassingly good deal”.
They have tried to pay it back, said Matthew Bloch, co-founder of Bytemark, by sponsoring DebConf and releasing their own Symbiosis packages for making hosting tasks on Debian servers easier. “We can’t match the unpaid efforts of the project’s thousand of volunteers” said Bloch, adding “We’re at least happy to be providing such a substantial part of Debian’s infrastructure”.
The donation will allow the Debian Systems Administration Team to put more geographic distance between the various services and improve the fault tolerance and availability of the end-user services. The storage will help with Debian’s current capacity issues too; several storage intensive services will be moved to Bytemark as part of the process of integrating in the new server. Further details of that process will appear on the infrastructure mailing list.
via The-H