New Datacenter for WordPress.com

Towards the end of 2008, we brought online a new datacenter to serve the over 5.5 million blogs now hosted on the WordPress.com platform.  Adding the data center in Chicago, IL gives us a total of 3 data centers across the US which serve live content at any given time.  We have decommissioned one of our facilities in the Dallas, TX area.  Our friends at Layered Technologies were kind enough to shoot this footage for us (think The Blair Witch Project) and the always awesome Michael Pick took care of the editing.  Here’s a peak at what a typical WordPress data center installation looks like…

For those interested in technical details here is a hardware overview of the installation:

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

And here is a graph of what the current CPU usage looks like across about 700 CPU cores.  As you can see there is plenty of idle CPU for those big spikes or in case one of the other 2 data centers fail and we have to route more traffic to this one.

cpuusage-chicago

37 responses to “New Datacenter for WordPress.com”

  1. That’s very cool Barry.

    I’m in a similar position to you, but I can’t imagine managing and planning that amount of hardware.

    Good work.

  2. Great post Barry. Thanks for sharing the technical details; I am sure many people find this information useful.

  3. Thanks for this perspective.

    How many k-watts/rack? Servers/rack? AC power only?

  4. […] this morning he posted a little article about the newest WordPress data center and included a video shot by Aaron Phillips. Watch really closely and you might catch a glimpse of […]

  5. […] sont bons derniers. Si vous êtes intéressés par l’infrastructure de réseaux sociaux, WordPress a publié aussi des détails (et une vidéo) sur leur nouveau centre de données.  SubscribeDiggdel.icio.usFacebookRedditStumbleUpon  |  (Pas de […]

  6. […] LinkedIn trail, in a pingdom study. If you are interested in the infrastructure of social networks, WordPress has a post (and a video) about their new data center. SubscribeDiggdel.icio.usFacebookRedditStumbleUpon  |  (No Ratings […]

  7. […] New Datacenter for WordPress.com « Barry on WordPress. […]

  8. […] gent de WordPress acaba d’anunciar l’adquisició de un nou centre de dades a la ciutat de Chicago, per donar suport als prop de 5.5 milions de blogs allotjats a sota la seva […]

  9. […] Congratulations to WordPress on their new datacenter. […]

  10. […] article fait écho au post du blog de Barry Abrahamson donnant les détails de l’architecture. Espérons que BuddyGrid en arrive là un jour. […]

  11. […] hchicha on fév.20, 2009, under WordPress L’équipe de WordPress a annoncé récemment que WordPress.com peut désormais supporter l’hébergement de plus de 5.5 millions de blogs. […]

  12. Des nouveaux serveurs chez wordpress.com…

    je viens de découvrir que le blog de Barry Abrahamson que wordpress vient de mettre en service une nouvelle infrastructure pour pouvoir gérer plus de 5.5 millions de blog sur le domaine wordpress.com .
    Bon certains me diront vive la centralisation de…

  13. […] HP servers . Racks, server, dual Quad Core CPU, air condition, go. post barry. […]

  14. Can i find more details, somewhere or are they secret?

    For example, are you using a Load Balanced cluster?

    I’m very interested in the WP infrastructure

    GrG

  15. […] – Pingdom release downtime statistics for the top social networks in 2008. – The hardware behind WordPress.com’s new Chicago data center. – Most mobile phone manufacturers agree on a universal phone charger. – First technical details […]

  16. […] New Datacenter for WordPress.com « Barry on WordPress […]

  17. […] New datacenter for wordpress en un blog vecino. […]

  18. How do you do to keep wordpress.com free ?

  19. I see you’re using munin to gather your data. how do you sum up the values? in the munin config file or is there some automagic way? is a pain to add each new server to the sum paragraphs in the munin file – that’s how we do it atm.

    1. We have a simple-ish script which reads the sever info from Servermattic and generates the munin configs automatically. This includes adding/removing hosts and producing the aggregate graph definitions.

      1. thanks Barry will have a look

  20. […] Towards the end of 2008, we brought online a new datacenter to serve the over 5.5 million blogs now hosted on the WordPress.com platform.  Adding the data center in Chicago, IL gives us a total of 3 data centers across the US which serve live content at any given time.  We have decommissioned one of […] […]

  21. Hi Barry,

    I really like the fact that you seem to heavily rely on open source software.

    Whenever I’m hoping to establish a new service, I try to base them on open source software. However I’ve found it hard to find any good realtime file replication services for Linux.

    Would you mind telling how you guys handle it? I assume you do file replication between the datacenters.

    regards,
    Erik

  22. […] More information, including a (somewhat shaky) video of the wordpress.com server facility is available here. […]

  23. Thats crazy!
    So much to keep track of..

    Glad Im not responsible

  24. […] “New Datacenter for WordPress.com.” Barry On WordPress.https://barry.wordpress.com/2009/02/16/new-datacenter-for-wordpresscom/. (May 24, […]

  25. […] diesem Blogpost gibt es ein paar Informationen über die technische Infrastruktur von wordpress.com. Die […]

  26. we love wordpress it has made easier our lives

  27. […] “New Datacenter for WordPress.com.” Barry On WordPress. https://barry.wordpress.com/2009/02/16/new-datacenter-for-wordpresscom/. (May 24, […]

  28. […] En alguno de los servidores que aparecen en este vídeo estaba alojado este blog allá por 2009 (Barry at WordPress) […]

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