(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Microblogging site Twitter (www.twitter.com) announced last week it will move its current data center service with NTT America to its own, custom-built data center somewhere in the Salt Lake City area later this year in an effort to improve its service.
Twitter said the new facility will provide it with “a much larger footprint in a building designed specifically around [its] unique power and cooling needs,” while housing “a mixed-vendor environment for servers running open source OS and applications”.
The company first revealed it would move to a new data center at the company’s Chirp developer conference back in April, however, it did not specify at the time whether it would be operating its own data center or leasing space at a wholesale data center.
Signing up more than 300,000 new users a day this year, on average, Twitter is growing at an enormous rate.
The rapid growth has caused several outages since June, which was partially brought on by World Cup fever.
The site suffered another outage last week, after a database glitch “got hung up running a long running query.”
Twitter was forced to restart the database, which took 12 hours to process, only to have to replace the entire database all together with another copy.
The company said it has taken the proper steps to ensure it “can more quickly detect and respond to similar issues in the future,” such as deploying “additional monitoring to catch errant queries like the one that caused Monday’s incident.”
And while the new data center will not remedy these database-related problems, it will definitely help accomodate any unexpected traffic spikes in its service.
Twitter addressed these challenges in a blog post last Wednesday. “Keeping pace with these users and their Twitter activity presents some unique and complex engineering challenges. Having dedicated data centers will give us more capacity to accommodate this growth in users and activity on Twitter.”
The site also said the new data center will give it more control over its networks and systems configuration, enabling it to make the necessary adjustments to its infrastructure.
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