Tweet this: New data center for Twitter is overdue

Twitter announced on its Engineering Blog that later this year it will open its own dedicated data center in the Salt Lake City area. The microblogger's Jean Paul Cozzatti said in his post that the dedicated data center will allow Twitter to "have full control over network and systems configuration, with a much larger footprint in a building designed specifically around our unique power and cooling needs." He said the facility will house a mixed-vendor environment for servers running open source operating systems and applications.

Twitter has faced some serious reliability issues. Not just lately, but consistently. The World Cup situation may have brought things to a head, but as a Tweeter myself I can't tell you how many times I've been frustrated by Fail Whale - the cute little image of the birds trying to carry the whale with the accompanying message that Twitter is overcapacity.

I don't work in the changing industry of media (formerly known as publishing); I work in the changed industry of media (no longer known as publishing). Social media is as fundamental to what I do on a daily basis as web offset used to be. Remember the old expression "Stop the presses!" that would be used when an event of tremendous significance happened? It referred to the newspaper business, specifically to the production of the daily newspaper grinding to a halt so that the front-page story could be changed. Well, in 2010 a platform like Twitter is "the press." And it stops involuntarily far too often.

Cozzatti says the new data center "is built for high availability and redundancy in our network and systems infrastructure. The first Twitter-managed data center is being designed with a multi-homed network solution for greater reliability and capacity."

Wikipedia found out earlier this year that an overheated data center plus an imperfect backup system is a bad combination. Now it's also building a data center for itself. Twitter reports that it is averaging 300,000 new accounts a day. I look forward to its new Salt Lake City data center proving to be up to the task.

Otherwise, I'm going to withhold my Twitter user fee in protest. Oh, wait a minute ...