Wikimedia Selects Green Data Center EvoSwitch as Internet HUB for Europe

Amsterdam and San Francisco, CA (Gawkwire.com) The Wikimedia Foundation manages eight distinct, open, wiki based free knowledge projects, including the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia.  
Wikipedia is consistently ranked one of the top five most visited websites in the world by comScore MediaMetrix, serving billions of page views every month.  All of Wikimedia’s projects are hosted on a central data infrastructure based in Florida, USA.  The complementary part of the infrastructure is now based in Amsterdam at the EvoSwitch data center.

'Hosting Europe'
“We're very pleased with EvoSwitch's professional and well secured data center environment, which includes a highly cost-efficient infrastructure in a location that is of great strategic importance to us,” explains Brion Vibber, Chief Technology Officer for the Foundation. “We are using the Amsterdam site for caching in particular, aiming to reduce the response time of our project websites in Europe.  EvoSwitch will also be a good location for backing up content that is stored at our Florida data center.  We will also be relocating European free knowledge projects to EvoSwitch, such as Toolserver.org – a project of the German Wikimedia chapter.”

Vibber considers the environmentally friendly nature of EvoSwitch another advantage.  “As operators of one of the most heavily accessed web property on the web, we are aware of the impact that the Internet 
and its energy consumption have on the environment,” explains Vibber.  
“EvoSwitch’s energy-saving measures, combined with their use of green energy and CO2 compensation are very attractive to us.”

'Amsterdam Hosting'
The Wikimedia Foundation's hosting infrastructure in Florida encompasses over 300 servers.  The Foundation will install about 50 servers at the EvoSwitch site in Amsterdam.

According to Vibber, “the Amsterdam servers both retrieve the content from the servers in Florida, as well as store it.  Web pages can then be displayed to Internet users directly from Amsterdam, which improves 
the speed and accessibility of the web pages in Europe significantly.  
I expect that we will further increase our capacity at EvoSwitch in the near future due to the required storage capacity and new European publishing projects.”

'Open Internet'
The Wikimedia Foundation is a nonprofit organization with idealistic 
objectives that are in line with EvoSwitch’s corporate objectives.  
“We are strong supporters of Wikimedia and their Wikipedia free knowledge project in particular,” confirms Eric Boonstra, EvoSwitch’s Commercial Director.  “The Foundation's operations coincide with the objectives of our own organization, to keep the Internet 'open' and stimulate freedom of expression and the transmission of knowledge via the Internet.  This partnership is all the more special to us because of Wikimedia’s faith in EvoSwitch.”