Fail Whale Endangered? Twitter adding new dedicated data center this year

Twitter on Wednesday announced that it is relocating its technical operations infrastructure to a custom-built data center in the vicinity of Salt Lake City, Utah later this year. The move is expected to help the site's reliability and availability.

Popular microblogging site Twitter is estimated to have over 75 million users, and to be growing at a rate of about 6.2 million new accounts per month.

When the site was at its growth peak one year ago, it became a newsworthy event every time the site went unavailable for more than a matter of minutes. After countless instances of the site going unavailable, Twitter's unreliability has become par for the course. Even after Twitter had its worst month for stability and service outages in nearly a year, due in no small part to The 2010 World Cup, it is still attracting some 300,000 new users a day.

At the heart of it, Twitter needs to accommodate the steadily increasing user base. With dedicated data centers, it should be able to support the high level of activity on the site, and give Twitter more room for infrastructure development.

"Twitter will 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," Twitter Engineer Jean-Paul Cozzatti said yesterday. "Twitter will be able to define and manage to a finer grained SLA on the service as we are managing and monitoring at all layers. The data center will house a mixed-vendor environment for servers running open source OS and applications."