May 24, 2012

From the joint press release with NYI:

The FreeBSD Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to supporting the FreeBSD Project and community, today announced that it is preparing the launch of its East Coast mirror at NYI (www.nyi.net), a New York City-based, mission-critical data services provider specializing in colocation, dedicated servers, managed services, and business continuity solutions.

The mirror will replicate key West coast Project infrastructure at NYI Bridgewater, NYI’s 40,000-square-foot datacenter in Bridgewater, New Jersey, located approximately 40 miles from New York City. The deployment will also include IPv6-only system build infrastructure. 

“This has been a great process,” said George Neville-Neil, Board Member of the FreeBSD Foundation. “NYI has been instrumental in keeping things running smoothly for us, while offering us the benefit of their flexibility and expertise. We look forward to sharing the improved capabilities the mirror gives us with the Community.”

“FreeBSD has been a critical component of everything we do,” said Phillip Koblence, VP Operations, NYI. “We look upon this launch as our way of giving back to a community whose open source projects have enabled us to craft customized solutions for our customers from the inside out.”

Main Benefits of East Coast Mirror:

  • Enterprise-grade redundancy and reliability for Project infrastructure
  • Reduced latency during heavy download times
  • Load-balancing between coasts
  • Up-to-date backups of all Project data synchronized via high-speed connections
  • Ability to move services between sites when doing scheduled maintenance 
  • Improved FreeBSD package building for end-users
  • IPv6 kernel and package build infrastructure

“Going forward, we expect even greater efficiencies,” commented Neville-Neil. “We have ordered extra hardware for added package-building speed and to aid a related project, RedPorts, which is used by ports developers and maintainers to do test builds before release.”

The East coast mirror at 999 Frontier is also notable because it is a significant upgrade of the FreeBSD Project’s infrastructure; provides dual-configuration so that experimental vs. production runs can be separated out, allowing changes to the ports system to be evaluated continuously rather than interrupting production flow; deploys to multiple sites, providing resiliency in the event of a failure; provides build capacity required to support continuous ports upgrades required to support binary packages, while maintaining ports-stable regression testing.

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to have been able to fund the purchase of the hardware. John Baldwin, Brad Davis, Steven Kreuzer, Mark Linimon, and Simon Nielsen from the FreeBSD Project worked on the build out and configuration of the systems, along with key members of the NYI team.

For more information about The FreeBSD Foundation, visit: http://www.FreeBSDFoundation.org. For more information about NYI Bridgewater, read Data Center Knowledge’s profile or visit the facility’s official site: http://www.nyi.net/facilities/more/new_jersey