The Debian OS Snapshot Archive, available at http://snapshot.debian.org, allows access to old software packages accepted into Debian since the operating system’s first release over twenty years ago. The snapshot archive provides developers with access to an immense amount of historical information regarding Debian packages, enabling software development including debugging and patching.
The Debian snapshot archive is growing year-on-year, currently expanding at a rate of more than 5 TB per year. As a result, The Debian Project needed a hosting partner that could support its worldwide infrastructure needs.
As part of a three-year commitment, LeaseWeb Netherlands has provided a private rack with storage servers to The Debian Project, housed in one of its data centers located in the Amsterdam region. The solution provides Debian with an improved user experience thanks to the additional bandwidth capacity, as well as a direct connection to one of the world’s largest IP networks with more than 4.5 Tbps of bandwidth available.
Global availability
“The OS Snapshot Archive is extremely important for Debian,” said Luca Filipozzi, core member of the Debian System Administration Team. “There are thousands of Debian software packages on the snapshot platform. It contains twenty years of history captured in a single place. If developers don’t have a local repository available, they can easily find an old version from years ago, which makes the archive a valuable asset to them. But to have it all available online on a global base is a big request for most hosting providers. LeaseWeb Netherland’s high-performance infrastructure and global reach ensures that our snapshot archive is available to developers from anywhere in the world.”
“Currently, this storage platform has a growth rate of about 5 TB per year, but we can’t accurately predict which packages will be updated in the years to come,” added Filipozzi. “In the future we might need extra storage space, but LeaseWeb Netherlands has provided us with a highly scalable storage solution and good options for quickly adding large amounts of additional storage if needed.”
Donation to the open source project
As The Debian Project is a registered non-profit open source initiative (under SPI) with thousands of volunteers worldwide, LeaseWeb Netherlands is providing its storage and hosting services free of charge as a donation to the open source project.
The hosting provider is familiar with the open source OS, as a significant number of its clients run a Debian distribution of the Linux OS. Around one quarter of LeaseWeb Netherlands’ customer base is running a Debian OS, usually for web servers and mail servers. The remaining three quarters of its clients opt for CentOS, Ubuntu (which is derived from Debian), FreeBSD, or Windows.
“Donations play a crucial role in supporting free and open source software projects,” said Marc Burkels, Manager Bare Metal Servers, LeaseWeb. “LeaseWeb developers are part of the Debian community, sharing their knowledge and contributing code back. We want to honor and support the twenty years of effort put into this rock-solid operating system.”
About Debian
The Debian Project is a worldwide group of volunteers who have made common cause to create a free operating system. This operating system is called Debian. The Debian Project was officially founded by Ian Murdock on August 16th, 1993. Murdock intended Debian to be a distribution which would be made openly, in the spirit of Linux and GNU. At that time, the whole concept of a distribution of Linux was new. The latest release of Debian is version 7.5. Currently, various processor types are supported to one extent or another, including Intel i386 and above, Alpha, ARM, Intel IA-64, Motorola 68k, MIPS, PA-RISC, PowerPC, Sparc (and UltraSparc), IBM S/390 and Hitachi SuperH.