A Solo Tweet

Tuesday, 27 July 2010 02:28

Written by Rakesh Dogra

Twitter will promise users a whale of a time, instead of a “fail whale,” by announcing its plans to begin using its new data center in Salt Lake City. The fail whale appeared on numerous occasions in June, much to the dismay of Tweeters. Quite often, users of the site would be welcomed by an affable whale announcing that the site was unavailable.

The fail whale did not garner many fans, because it represented a huge disruption for several million user records. Even as recent as this week, the user database crashed. Users were unable to sign in or sign up. The user database stores 125 million details. It returned to operational status after almost 12 hours. Perhaps most embarrassingly and inconveniently, the fail whale appeared several times on the Twitter site during the World Cup. Oceans of people seeking to tweet away about the games were instead washed away by the friendly whale.

As a Twitter spokesman stated, the company has been working for several months now to sort out performance-related problems. With a dedicated data center, Twitter can better serve the needs of the almost 300,000 new users signing up for the service every day. Apart from the ever-increasing number of Twitter users, demand for the analytical power needed for the service is also tremendous. In addition, the company has announced plans to move beyond standard display advertising.

The new Twitter data center will deliver the advantages of flexibility, speed, reliability, growth, and scalability, as well as infrastructure planning. The company is also investing in several more data centers that will be brought online in the next couple of years.

Twitter states that it will have complete power over systems and network design in the data center. It will also have a multi-homed network, which ensures better support for future growth as well as greater reliability (less downtime). The crucial points for Twitter with this and other data centers will be minimizing downtime and enhancing redundancy.

The self-hosted data center will be a powerful tool that allows the company to keep pace with the growth in the microblogging sector. It is set to go online in two years and will complement the current data center that Twitter operates in association with NTT America. Twitter is not, however, waiting for two years to make the changes felt. The company has already started work on adding more capacity in the next few days.

Such is the commitment that Twitter is putting behind the new data center. According to Twitter spokesman Matt Graves, the company has pulled resources from other projects for this data center and has also concentrated a huge portion of its engineering efforts for the same.

Twitter has seen phenomenal growth since its launch in 2006. It blends the power of blogging and instant-message services and allows its users to send and receive messages using their mobile devices and personal computers.

Another company investing heavily in a self-hosted data center is Apple, which is planning a gargantuan data center in North Carolina with a price tag of $1 billion. Also, companies like Facebook and Google are already operating from dedicated data centers instead of using conventional cloud services. Twitter is also following in the footsteps of companies like eBay, which revamped its IT structure to deal with power outages and scalability.

Such a move makes sense for companies wanting to harness the cloud to enhance their operations. Twitter can now structure its energy-management policies and can weave together IT DNA that best suits its growth plans. The IT industry has evolved dramatically, and Twitter has been able to change over the years following its inception. For instance, the company had begun operations with cloud services and then progressed to colocation data center operations; now, it has reached the point that it can build its own data center.

Perhaps now Twitter can harpoon the onscreen fail whale for good!