[OSM-talk] STRATO sponsors three servers for use by OSM

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

    the Berlin-based hosting provider STRATO AG is sponsoring three 
servers for use by the OSM community. The sponsoring deal has been 
signed between German FOSSGIS e.V. and STRATO. In return, STRATO get a 
logo placement on openstreetmap.de.

The three servers (quad-core Opteron machines with 16 GB RAM and 2 TB 
hard disks that cost EUR 200/month each if you order them from STRATO) 
will be used as a tile server, a tools server (production environment 
for interesting services) and a dev server respectively. There is no 
traffic limitation, and STRATO has even offered to tune their network to 
better accomodate us (apparently a tile server under load looks very 
much like a DDOS to unsuspecting monitoring software).

We hope to offer some alternative map styles on the tile server 
(possibly a classic central European "Michelin" style with yellow/orange 
motorways, and also a subdued style that is well suited as a background 
map), but the server could also take some load off tile.osm.org if that 
is desired.

The dev server is open to anyone with an interesting idea as long as 
they don't gobble up all resources.

While we do casually refer to these new servers as the "German" dev 
server and the "German" tile server, they are open to all members of the 
worldwide OSM community.

There's more on the Wiki:

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/FOSSGIS/Server

All this is still very much work in progress (the tile server only has a 
few Berlin tiles for testing, styles are not defined yet, database 
replication still needs to be set up and so on).

A big thank you to STRATO for their support. I hope that over the coming 
months, the community is going to make good use of these servers. The 
FOSSGIS/OSM server admin team can be contacted at admin at openstreetmap.de.

Bye
Frederik