The British hosting company Bytemark has donated hardware and hosting services to the Debian GNU/Linux project which will be used to host the project's core infrastructure.

The hardware that has been donated consists of an HP BladeSystem, with 16 server blades, and several HP Modular Storage Arrays, making for a total of 57 terabytes, according to a media release from Debian.

Debian is a community GNU/Linux project begun in 1993. It has three streams of development, the largest number of ports of any distribution and, apart from its own users, has served as the basis for numerous other distributions.

Bytemark, which is popular with geeks, has been using Debian in its operations since it opened shop 11 years ago. It has built its own command-line cloud-hosting platform known as BigV, and also offers Symbiosis, a set of packages to hosting on Debian even easier.

The company's co-founder, Matthew Bloch, was quoted as saying: "Bytemark's servers have relied on Debian since the day we started the company in 2002, and it was always an embarrassingly good deal. We've tried to repay it through sponsorship of the annual DebConf gatherings, and through publication of Symbiosis.

"While we can't match the unpaid efforts of the project's thousand of volunteers, we're at least happy to be providing such a substantial part of Debian's infrastructure. Debian's success will continue to spur Bytemark's."

Luca Filipozzi, a member of the Debian Systems Administration team, said the hardware and hosting donation would allow the team to distribute the project's core services across more geographically diverse locations, and improve the fault-tolerance and availability of end- user facing services.

"Additionally, the storage component of this donation will dramatically reduce the storage challenges that Debian currently faces. Our plan is to move several storage-intensive services to Bytemark," he said.

"It is only through donations of time, goods and funds that the 100 percent volunteer Debian Project is able to operate the critical infrastructure necessary to support its work."

The release said additional information of which services would be moved to the new equipment would be provided soon on the debian-infrastructure-announce mailing list.