[Strategic] Server hardware donation offer

[Eugene Usvitsky]

Hi Mikel and everyone,

I would like to mention one offer that (to my opinion) went unnoticed.
Possibly, it should be added to agenda for today's meeting.

Large Russian web portal Rambler [1] that can be compared to Yahoo! in
Russian segment of the Internet has recently decided to support
OpenStreetMap project by donating some of its computing resources to
it. The primary decision was to donate up to 16 servers but later it
was changed to more generous one.

Currently the company donates as much dedicated servers as OSM asks
(within reasonable limits, of course). These servers will be either
specifically built within asked hardware requirements (number of
disks, processors, type of RAID) or ready ones will be offered. The
limitations here are mainly result of the fact that Rambler doesn't
buy a specific hardware for OSM but offers its own. Their hardware
strategy is closer to Google's - a lot of cheaper servers instead of
several expensive ones. These servers will be situated in their own
Moscow datacenter and connected to 1 Gbit/s unmetered channel. Rambler
is providing hardware support only - OSMF itself will be responsible
for all admin stuff.

One active OSM member, Gleb Smirnoff aka glebius, is working in
Rambler server support group. Mainly due to his activity this decision
was made and now he is informally governing these servers. Currently 1
server is already setup for OSM database mirror and the database is
being uploaded there. All the rest projects are up to OSMF decision.

Gleb sent the information about this donation to TWG a couple of weeks
ago and his message was definitely received but no answer was given. I
would like to note that due to this fact, MapQuest's $50k that should
primarily be spent on hardware upgrade can possibly go to somewhere
else since we can get these servers from Rambler. Rambler is large,
well-known and respected company (definitely larger than CloudMade or
MapQuest before AOL) so decline of such offer would be stupid.

If agreed, the discussion about usage of these servers should be
started but now it is more important to give a definite answer - yes
or no. In any case, these servers will be used by Russian OSM
community for several internal projects but it would be better for
everyone if they were officially available from OSMF for larger scope
of developers.

Best regards,
Eugene Usvitsky.

[1] : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rambler_(portal)