"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," Foundation Chief Technology Officer Brion Vibber said. "We will be 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," Vibber added. "Finally, we will be relocating European publishing projects to EvoSwitch, such as Toolserver.org – a project of the German Wikimedia chapter."
Wikimedia's hosting infrastructure in Florida reportedly encompasses more than 300 servers; with about 50 servers being installed at the EvoSwitch site in Amsterdam.
"The Amsterdam servers will both retrieve the content from the servers in Florida, as well as store it," Vibber said. "Web pages can then be displayed to Internet users directly from Amsterdam, which will improve the speed and accessibility of the web pages in Europe significantly."
As part of the contract, Evoswitch is providing over 300,000 Euros of in-kind support in the form of bandwidth and hosting services. Vibber also considers the environmentally friendly nature of EvoSwitch another advantage.
"As operators of one of the most heavily accessed properties on the web, we are aware of the impact that the Internet and its energy consumption have on the environment," Vibber offered. "EvoSwitch's energy-saving measures, combined with their use of green energy and CO2 compensation are very attractive to us."
"We are strong supporters of Wikimedia and their Wikipedia publishing project in particular," EvoSwitch's Commercial Director Eric Boonstra said. "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," Boonstra concluded.
