It has taken us a few weeks to get things sorted with the Drupal donations but as of Friday 8/19/2005 we are officially on track.

Dries and I have been working for a few weeks on getting the generous donations of the Drupal community moved over to the OSL so we could execute on the plans we laid out earlier. Unfortunately international money transfers aren't as easy as international file transfers. That said, we got it figured out this week and have started in earnest on finalizing things.

We have ordered the Dell gear that we originally outlined. We'll end up with 3 new machines (2 web heads and an admin/staging server) in addition to the Sun v20 that was donated to us. That gear should be here in a few weeks.

In the mean time, we have deployed one Dell 1850 + the Sun v20 and are preparing to move the Drupal site over. These machines have been configured/tuned to handle the entire Drupal site for the time being (we had a spare 1850 around and will replenish our backup supply with one from the new gear that is landing). Once that other gear lands, we can start working on things like SVN/CVS and other tools to help the Drupal development.

We have also hired another intern here at the OSL that will be dedicated to Drupal for the next 2 months. This intern will work with our full-time people to help the Drupal community execute on the transition to the new equipment as well as bring up new services to grow the community even further.

The OSL is really excited about this opportunity and we can't wait to really, really finalize the equipment and infrastructure so Drupal can best focus on its "main thing"; building an amazing CMS ... :)

(Cross-posted on http://staff.osuosl.org/~kveton/2005/08/22/finalizing-the-drupal-plan/.)