Wikipedia is giving away its old servers

Wikimedia, the foundation that oversees Wikipedia and related projects, is upgrading a lot of its servers, and cycling out some of the old hardware. But rather than selling it or throwing it away, they're donating it to other, worthy projects -- maybe even yours.

Most systems (but possibly not all) have the following specifications:
* Dual CPU 2.5 GHz
* From 3GB to 24GB of RAM, depending on role.
* Most have 80 GB or larger HDD (some have two hard drives, some drives are 160GB or possibly even 250GB)
If you are interested, please provide the following information in your email to us: * Registered non-profit name and information.
* Your contact information, including email address, phone number, and relationship with requesting non-profit.
* Information on the non-profit, their charter, mission and goals.
* Shipping address information for a FedEx Ground delivery (i.e., the shipment destination)*
* How the servers will be used. (We like to know and share with folks!)

Server Decommission Donations (via DVICE)

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Anonymous

Excellent – now that’s green in action.
Anonymous

Im sure most of these machines were just nodes on web server cluster with shared SAN storage or something similar. Which would explain the small hard drives.
BrendanBabbage

“We are not donating these servers to private individuals for personal use.”

This is wrong.
They profit plenty off of us with the ads and the first X dozen links for most searches being spam/ad or worse sites.

Myself I’d like one or two of these to hook up to my render engine. PoserPro 2010 handles these things so a few of these server racks to run network renders…
- Anonymous
  
  uhhh there is no advertising on wikipedia and they are a non-profit…
- Anonymous
  
  Wikipedia is run by the non-profit organization Wikimedia foundation. Much of their staff is volunteers.
  
  They don’t run any ads on their site, only a banner asking for donations from time to time.
Roy Trumbull

Much depends on the config software. Sometimes drives have been replaced by bigger ones in the market and the smaller ones are no loner made. In some systems the only way you can make a new drive useful is to have the server treat it as a smaller drive. That’s the main gotcha I’ve seen.
hadlock

Those are pretty high server specs for pretty underwhelming hard drive sizes. I wonder who in Wikimedia purchasing is in bed with an enterprise server salesman.
- Anonymous
  
  I suspect those are SCSI drives, which would explain the relatively small drive capacities. What is unusual is that it sounds like they’re not RAIDed–now, that *is* surprising.
  - Anonymous
    
    SCSI drives do not come in those sizes.
    
    18, 36, 74, 147, etc. SAS is the same.
- Anonymous
  
  The hard drives probably only load the boot image, 80gb drives are ATA not SCSI. They do not need to be fast, or redundant. Clusters store their data on the SAN not in the server. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia#Software_and_hardware
- ZachPA
  
  You’d be even more appalled to find out that many of those hard drives are actually short-stroked. That’s where the administrator has deliberately restricted the partition to the first 10, maybe 20 percent of the drive in order to reduce the amount of movement the drive’s arm needs to make to read and write data.