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The hardware behind the newest WordPress.com data center

The people behind the WordPress.com blogging service recently shared some technical information about their new data center in Chicago, which is located in a Layered Technologies facility.

WordPress.com hosts about 5.5 million blogs on its platform, and is not to be confused with the stand-alone WordPress software (which you find at WordPress.org and host yourself).

Here is the server hardware powering the latest WordPress.com data center:

  • 150 HP DL165s dual quad-core AMD 2354 processors 2GB-4GB RAM
  • 50 HP DL365s dual dual-core AMD 2218 processors 4GB-16GB RAM
  • 5 HP DL185s dual quad-core AMD 2354 processors 4GB RAM

That’s a total of 1,440 CPU cores and somewhere between 520 GB and 1.4 TB of RAM. In other words, a significant amount of computing power…

This is one of three data centers that power WordPress.com.

More information, including a (somewhat shaky) video of the server facility is available here.

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16 Comments

Why HP? Wouldn’t a more generic set of boxes be more cheaper but just as reliable?

Which set of machines are used for what? Would you be willing to share your architecture?

Why are they not on Amazon’s EC2 or S3 or something like that?

I have a quad proc running gentoo. The speed is insane.

Thanks for the good information. I like wordpress.

How much SQL Server hardware is enough? And do you prefer AMD or Intel CPUs powering for their new data center?

Cheers

“Why HP? Wouldn’t a more generic set of boxes be more cheaper but just as reliable?”

When buying that much equipment, it is usually cheaper to go with a larger brand, in this case, HP. It all depends on how much equipment you buy per year, and what your price structure is with said vendor.

Thanks for this good article. It fascinated me. I’ve never imagine that WordPress team had such a enormous amount of servers to handle their website. They are too strong and off course, every expensive right ;)

That is awesome, I wonder how much all of that hardware cost?

No news is good news for the Super Bowl website

The New England Patriots held what seemed to be a commanding lead (17-15) with five minutes left of Super Bowl XLVI last night. But the New York Giants came back and managed to win with 21-17.

As exciting as the game sounds, we missed the whole thing, instead spending our time watching the Superbowl.com website.

It turned out to be a rather dull thing to do because the site held up well and there was no downtime at all. The response time also didn’t give away anything significant in terms of online Super Bowl traffic.

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As Super Bowl 46 is approaching, fans will flock to the Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, Indiana, and to TV sets around the world to follow the New York Giants battle it out with the New England Patriots.

Kickoff is scheduled for 6:30EST on Sunday, February 5, and we’re already monitoring Superbowl.com to see how the site will handle the event.

What team will win Super Bowl 46? How will the site cope? We can only wait to find out.

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Weekend must-read articles #2

Every Friday we bring you a collection of links to places on the web that we find particularly newsworthy, interesting, entertaining, and topical. We try to focus on some particular area or topic each week, but in general we will cover Internet, web development, networking, performance, and other geeky topics.h

This week we bring you a collection of articles focusing on cloud, with a few other topics thrown in to boot.

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Out of the 59 US-based e-commerce sites we monitored during the holiday season last year 28 scored a perfect 100% uptime for December.

Whether this helped spur on the booming sales in the US, we don’t know, but retail e-commerce spending in the US reached $37.2 billion for the November to December 2011 period. That was an increase of 15% from the same period in 2010.

We decided to dig into the numbers for these e-commerce sites to see how well they did in terms of uptime and performance. After massaging the data coming from our Pingdom probes, it turns out that the sites overall performed well during December 2011 in terms of uptime, but response time was an issue for several sites.

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Pingdom Podcast #5

Pingdom’s Mobile Podcast is a weekly show about Internet, web, and mobile stuff.

In this show, Saleh also gives us an update on the pending submission of his Carbon for Windows Phone Twitter client. We’re also joined by Mario Lurig, who talks about using Amazon S3 and Cloudfront to speed up a website.

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