Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Wikipedia Bulks Up

Link to January 13 Network World post, "Wikipedia gears up for explosion in digital media".

Excerpt:
Wikipedia is gearing up for an explosion in digital content with new servers and storage designed to handle larger photo and video uploads.

Video file sizes are quickly reaching the dozens and hundreds of megabytes, and the proliferation of high-megapixel cameras means even small photos can take up a few megabytes, says Brion Vibber, CTO at the Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia. Until early 2008, the user-generated encyclopedia's primary media file server had just 2TB of total space, Vibber says.

"For a long time, we just did not have the capacity [to handle very large media files]," he says.


Wikipedia has since scaled up from 2TB to 24TB and now 48TB of storage for its primary medial file server, and recently raised file upload limits from 20MB to 100MB. The amount of storage actually being used is about 5TB but that will grow quickly, Vibber says.

No comments: