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134 Comments
- samanathon, on 10/09/2008, -0/+92"...Wikipedia's tiny five-person IT staff to maintain Wikipedia's approximately 400 servers."
Wow, I would have never guessed that Wikipedia's servers were managed by only five people! - sirhomer, on 10/09/2008, -0/+75Yes - one of the biggest and most popular sites in the world with site traffic that very few major companies can even comprehend, let alone deal with, runs completely on 400 standard looking servers and a total of five IT staff. How many CTO jaw drops will occur on hearing this news? Quick, someone call the "Highly Reliable Times".
- RoboDonut, on 10/09/2008, -5/+49So they switched from Linux... to Linux?
It sort of makes me uncomfortable that everyone's switching to Ubuntu. Yes, it's a pretty good distro, but I'd hate for there to be loss of diversity among Linux distributions as a result of Ubuntu's dominance. - tvanwyk, on 10/09/2008, -4/+39"Major win?"
Didn't know there was a "Battle to Anoint the #1 Distro" going on. What is this, the Royal Rumble of Unix-like operating systems? As long as Wikipedia's well managed, fast, and well-maintained, I couldn't personally care less what Linux distro they're using. - Devrdander, on 10/10/2008, -2/+34not to downplay their work, but the # of servers has nothing to do with the # of people required, When all the servers do a small set of jobs, and are load balanced, you can easily bulk manage them. Still takes a lot of foresight and skill though.
- bobcrotch, on 10/10/2008, -0/+31Nice rack
- snowblindnz, on 10/10/2008, -2/+33I guess the only real win for Ubuntu here is that Wikipedia will be reporting bugs / fixes that they experience with their ~400 server load balanced website, which will help improve Ubuntus stability etc..
I doubt ubuntu has had much usage / testing / reporting in this kind of very large server environment. - rasp, on 10/10/2008, -1/+30years ago I managed about 1500 machines by myself. This is about a quarter of them
http://www.anticlockwise.com/farm2.jpg - Clbull, on 10/09/2008, -0/+28and with little downtime too
- armo, on 10/10/2008, -0/+17Ubuntu server edition is cli only, unless you choose to install the desktop.
- manfrin, on 10/10/2008, -1/+17Imageshack has well over 400 servers they use, and probably disseminate more content (per kB) than wikipedia does -- and was, up until a point, managed by one ex-Google programmer (Jack Levin).
Although, he was a principal architect in developing Google's server management, so he has a bit of a resume. - enantiodromia, on 10/10/2008, -6/+19that ratio is actually not that impressive. 2 people could handle that if they were good.
/at the datacenter right now, looking at my 200 servers - Vadi0, on 10/10/2008, -6/+18Useless unless they put something like "powered by ubuntu" sticker on every page.
- iritegood, on 10/10/2008, -2/+13How well does Ubuntu function as a server OS?
- Katana314, on 10/10/2008, -0/+11There's always gonna be the outliers, even if there are 3 main ones.
- fogster, on 10/10/2008, -0/+10It's pretty much Debian. I always thought of Ubuntu as 'Debian for the desktop,' but Ubuntu actually has two main release streams, one for desktops and one for servers. Debian *rocks* on servers, so I wouldn't be at all surprised if Ubuntu works well, too.
- nkassi, on 10/10/2008, -0/+10Very well, it's consistency is what I always like, redhat has always seem to be more badaged around and details not being taken cared of properly. Also, Ubuntu offers free updates while redhat does not (fedora does) and then offers support through Canonical which is considered a 3rd party.
The goods include: Superior Package manager(yum SUCKS!), Debian standards (where the consistency comes from in my view), bleading edge.
The bad: No real gui management of server functions (Server edition, but same for regular), Canonical isn't as big as redhat, less Hardware and Software vendor integration (but Redhat compared to windows...), Management perception.
In all it's pretty decent, fast, and reliable and the same can be said of redhat. I much prefer the Ubuntu feel and so I'm a little bias but RedHat is not going to die, it has a strong offering, many followers, and Major Vendor support. If I had to choose between 95% Windows and 5% Ubuntu or 50/50 Win/RedHat I'd manage them Redhat boxens in a heartbeat.
I run all three at work in a University datacenter (and gulp! some solaris too.) - inactive, on 10/10/2008, -0/+10I've been a long time... .LONG time openSuse user. Just swtiched to Ubuntu 8/04 this week and I'm already "in love" with it ..... :-/
- Garciat, on 10/10/2008, -4/+13I bet people at Ubuntu headquarters are proud of their baby.
- freehunter, on 10/10/2008, -6/+15I'd love it. So much redundancy, when most of the distros are working to the same end. We really only need three distros, desktop/laptop, server, and business. Within them, you can have projects like Ubuntu Studio, but anything more than Debian, Slack, and Red Hat is just saturating the market and stealing workers from other projects.
- inactive, on 10/10/2008, -4/+13What if you want something completely different from what those distros offer? Too bad I guess, gotta stick with the Microsoft philosophy of "everybody must use the same *****."
- SmilinBob82, on 10/10/2008, -0/+8Apparently it is...
- agentBanana, on 10/10/2008, -1/+9Pffft... half a person could manage 200 servers. I'm at my datacenter, looking at my 10,037 servers.
- mrroarke, on 10/10/2008, -1/+8
"Ubuntu's always been popular with users" [citation needed] - seanmc303, on 10/10/2008, -0/+7The win for people like myself is that we may now have an easier time trying to convince a client that they should use Ubuntu Server.
- inactive, on 10/10/2008, -5/+12If this Ubuntu thing catches on I'm switching to windows.
- seanmc303, on 10/10/2008, -0/+7I have to support RHEL, Centos, and Ubuntu servers on a daily basis, and Ubuntu Server is the clear winner. Unless you absolutely need a GUI, I would highly recommend Ubuntu Server.
- fogster, on 10/10/2008, -0/+7I think it's catching some people by surprise, as Ubuntu is pretty popular with "new" Linux users on the desktop... And thus I think some are quick to scorn it, even though, in reality, the fact that it's used by new Linux users doesn't mean that it's not also a good choice for veteran Linux users. (I switched from Gentoo, which is arguably considered a "hard core" distro, to Ubuntu...)
Their move to a common, standard distribution was definitely a good move, as the various Linux distros will keep things in different places, which makes management a pain. (It's solely my biased opinion, but I found yum, the RedHat/CentOS/Fedora package manager, to be an absolute nightmare to use. The new release apparently requires 768 MB RAM for yum to work, and it's slow as heck...)
Ubuntu is descended from Debian, which has a pretty good heritage as a nice stable, well-regarded distribution. Of course, as the end of the day, it's hard to say whether it was a "wise/bad/neutral move" -- as another commenter pointed out, they moved from Linux to Linux. The end user only sees the web content served up by Apache (actually, by squid), so the short answer is that no one except the admins will really notice any difference. - sampowers, on 10/10/2008, -0/+6We're standardizing on Ubuntu server at my workplace. We have 24 Windows 2003 servers and 14 Linux servers, 11 of which are running Ubuntu.
I'm a Debian guy, but some of my coworkers are inexperienced with Linux, and I'd like to set them up so they could pay Canonical for support if/when I move on from this job. I know there are businesses that do support for Debian, but the popularity of Ubuntu makes me think that maybe it would be easier to find commercial support.
Apart from the Canonical support angle, there are a few other things that led me to my decision to use Ubuntu:
- VMware ESX Server, which we also use, pays more attention to making sure the vmware-tools package compiles on Ubuntu.
- It takes all of 5 minutes using the likewise-open package which is easily available in Ubuntu (universe, I think) to configure an Ubuntu server to authenticate against Active Directory. This is very important to us. I've done winbind + kerberos + pam_ldap before, but it's a pain in the ass, didn't work like I wanted to, and now that I've used Likewise, I never want to do it that way ever again. - Culyt, on 10/10/2008, -0/+6It doesn't have to be branded on every page, Ubuntu sellers can say "Wikipedia runs it" and now everyone on Digg knows it (100k+ people?).
The PR from it is likely to be more use than money would be, in fact that support would probably be $750 for all 400 servers juging from the Ubuntu support page. You can't really define a 'server' now days with virtualization, clustering and such, is it number of installs? (is that defined by the number of kernels in execution?), there is also nothing stopping people from just buying support for the 1 server and mirroring the changes to all 400. MS try to classify it as number of processors or users depending on the product, but its impossible to force such artificial constraints on Open Source software.
☢ - bipolarruledout, on 10/10/2008, -1/+7Really does it matter THAT MUCH what linux distribution you use on a server?
- doublej42, on 10/10/2008, -0/+6I also run it on all of my servers, Some of them for a medium sized company. It's basically debian with a few updates and improvements. Just always use LTS.
- cdigioia, on 10/10/2008, -0/+6So as someone without much Linux knowledge - is this a wise/bad/neutral move, why?
- mynameistux, on 10/10/2008, -0/+5+5 Insightful
- strangewill, on 10/10/2008, -0/+5I'm at my datacenter looking at my infinite number of servers, and playing minesweeper.
- HonoredMule, on 10/10/2008, -0/+5Hey, it's not like they're having to babysit /Windows/ servers. I bet half of them haven't been manually logged into since they were installed.
- fogster, on 10/10/2008, -0/+5Why the hate for Linux? I run Linux on my webserver and laptop, and OpenBSD on my firewall. Both of them rock.
That's like says "Gooo cake! Buried because this is about ice cream." You don't have to hate one good thing to like another. - fogster, on 10/10/2008, -0/+5As I understand it, Ubuntu's been in the mix for a while at Wikipedia. The Digg community might find their (somewhat dated) "Wikipedia servers" page, interesting, actually: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_servers
- voyvf, on 10/10/2008, -0/+5Considering that both Redhat and Canonical make money (and quite a bit of it) off of support contracts, there is, in fact, a battle going on. It's no better or worse than that of any other company, just simple business.
One can work with free software and still be in business, you know. - threemagic, on 10/10/2008, -0/+4I laughed.. seriously.. I did. I laughed because while he was writing this somewhere in his head he thought he was funny and clever. Now that's hilarious.
- KAMiKAZOW, on 10/10/2008, -1/+5Considering that their IT staff is already familiar with the Red Hat family of Linux products, they want to standardize on a single product while not paying for RHEL, I had chosen CentOS as well.
- inactive, on 10/10/2008, -1/+5That they only need five people shows how efficient Linux system management can be (unlike some other popular "operating systems"!).
- brettalton, on 10/10/2008, -0/+4More info on Wikimedia servers: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_servers
I recall them using a Red Hat, Fedora and Ubuntu mix back in '06 and, even as an Ubuntu zealot, I couldn't care less. A win for Linux is a win for Linux. - Manther, on 10/10/2008, -0/+4The kernel itself is completely separate from any distro, so your fear for that is probably something you can let go of. In terms of Ubuntu becoming THE Linux distro, there's nothing to be afraid of there either. Ubuntu couldn't become the only distro, but it could become the distro for the masses, and that's fine. The nature of the linux community as it is, which is not large (comparatively speaking), allows for so many distros to exist. A greater popularity for Linux in general (through Ubuntu, or whatever means) won't be able to change that. People like to be different, and that won't change... look at the market for windows add-ons and themes and all that jazz to juice up your boring desktop....
- voyvf, on 10/10/2008, -1/+5XUbuntu is rather awesome. I'm seriously considering putting it on some of my Slackware boxes, after a test run on similar (older - ~ 400mhz, ~ 128mb ram) hardware.
- union, on 10/10/2008, -0/+4Well I am mostly Slackware fanboy but, everyone seems to be forgeting that Ubuntu is esentialy Debian (especialy without the GUI) and Debian is used as a server os a lot.
- mynameistux, on 10/10/2008, -0/+4one word
ME! - RajAtWork, on 10/10/2008, -0/+4Sometimes Ubuntu sends wrong signals as far as being ready for enterprise. For example, they now package Sun's Java and Tomcat application server. Being able to just apt-get tomcat is really tempting. However, Tomcat's powerful manager and admin app do not install cleanly because of wrong packaging. This kind of thing would quickly turn off a potential customer.
- aywwts4, on 10/10/2008, -1/+4When talking about ubuntu for servers, anything that isn't redhat/debranded clone is diverse. I doubt ubuntu's market share in any server environment employing more than one server is incredibly small.
Though really the glaring question isn't why aren't they moving to "RHEL or Fedora? Gordon Haff, an analyst at Illuminata Inc. pointed out that it would have cost them more money. Wikipedia's staff already has the in-house expertise they need to run a major Linux data center so they don't have a pressing need to pay for RHEL's support."
It's why didn't they switch to centos or whitebox, two completely free versions of redhat linux, just without the word "RedHat(™)" anywhere. - Manther, on 10/10/2008, -0/+3Dugg for proper use of "couldn't ... care less..."
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