Wikimedia's Wikipedia.org is one of the most visited websites approaching 250 million unique visitors per month. New content is pushed in by the over 100,000 volunteers who edit the articles. This announcement "Wikimedia Selects Sun Microsystems to Enhance Multimedia Experience..." describes how users can now upload large video files using the servers and open storage environment provided by Sun and other open source organizations.
The solution is built up in an open source paradise: MySQL, Apache, Sun's Open Storage infrastructure all on Sun's X4500 and X4150 Servers connected to Sun StorageTek arrays.
An article by Rafe Needleman in Webware further describes that the the Ogg Theora open source video compression technology will be used in a Firefox browser (more open source!). It is interesting that he says the current Wikipedia storage footprint is currently only 5TB growing to 15TB by 2009E.
Alka Gupta on our team has a great blog about Wikipedia's use of the rest of the LAMP stack to achieve the 7 billion page views that the 250 million visitors generate each month.
