The Eclipse Foundation has announced a major infrastructure upgrade of the Eclipse community web site  This upgrade was made possible through contributions of hardware and software from HP, IBM, Intel and Novell, Foundation said, and was made due to increased Web traffic and download rates among the burgeoning Eclipse open source community,

Eclipse.org’s web infrastructure has been redesigned to scale for growth and ensure high availability for the entire community. With approximately 1.2 million page views on an average day and 10 terabytes of data transferred per month, the previous infrastructure for the site was under a constant strain.

As more companies join the Eclipse Foundation and Eclipse technologies gain adoption across the industry, it was clear that a major change to the infrastructure was necessary. A new product release of Eclipse-based open source projects, such as the upcoming Eclipse 3.1 Platform launch, could cause massive surges in traffic and bring downloads to a standstill. With the new architecture, throughput is greatly increased as are the expanded capabilities needed for periods of high traffic.

“As the membership of the Foundation and the usage of the technology continues to grow, the scale and complexity of our site has expanded dramatically,” said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation. “We thank HP, IBM, Intel and Novell – all active members and leaders in open source – for their generous contributions toward better serving the needs of the community. With their help, we can continue our commitment to support the broad array of open source development in the Eclipse ecosystem.”

HP, IBM, Intel and Novell contributed software, hardware and expertise to help the Eclipse Foundation build this new web infrastructure.

HP contributed four new HP Integrity rx2600 servers, each equipped with two Intel® Itanium® 2 processors and 8GB of memory.

Intel contributed eight 1.3GHz Intel Itanium 2 processors that were coupled with the servers contributed by HP. In addition to the processors, Intel IT also contributed their expertise in large-scale enterprise computing by providing valuable assistance with the architectural design and implementation of the scalable and highly-available new Eclipse computing infrastructure.

IBM provided to the Foundation three IBM eServer p5 550 servers, each powered by four POWER5 processors and 16G of memory. The company also provided resources to help Eclipse expand its memory and storage space. IBM contributed 24 36G disks and an IBM TotalStorage EXP Plus 320 with 14 146G disks.

Novell donated SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server 9 for Intel Itanium Processor Family and IBM POWER processors for the infrastructure, as well as technical support services.