Wikipedia Hardware
My customer brought in Jimmy Wales to speak to a group of their top technologists. For those of you that don't know who Jimmy Wales is, he is the founder of Wikipedia and he is considered the Father of the Wiki. Dave Lemen summed up his presentation well in his Wiki Rock Star post.
As a technologists and an HP'er I was particularly interested when he discussed the software and infrastructure behind Wikipedia. With the amount of data they host and requests they handle, 200 servers spread across the world seemed rather small. He spoke gleefully of Yahoo and the support they have provided with a data center for Wikipedia in Asia. He spoke the exact opposite of the other data centers, one in particular, stating the "slow HP servers" were the current bottleneck in the system.
HP doesn't want Jimmy Wales making a statement like this ever. He is traveling the globe speaking to hundreds of people every working day. Wikipedia is an Internet Top 20 website. I don't know how they got the hardware. I don't know how old it is. I don't think it even matters. We want Jimmy Wales to be an HP evangelist. Come on HP, let's step up and make a donation to Wikipedia! If not for the sake of our own name, but for the sake of the culture that Wikipedia represents.
Update: HP France donated the orignial hardware to Wikipedia. Yeah HP! The hard part now is getting them to do it again.