Twitter will move into its own data center soon as it seeks to scale its social messaging service, according to a presentation by John Adams, one of the messaging service’s operations engineers. Speaking at the Chirp developer conference yesterday in a session on scale, he laid out Twitter’s strategy to keep the fail whale at bay — which included plans to soon move to its own data center.
It’s unlikely Twitter is building and operating this data center itself. In 2008 Twitter signed a contract to host its servers at NTT because the latency in the cloud was too high for its service, and last August NTT said it had leased 15,000 square feet in Santa Clara, Calif. for expanding its data center operations in part because of Twitter’s success. So my hunch is that Twitter is moving into NTT’s data center dedicated to the messaging service, as opposed to building and operating its own, which would take a while. I’ve reached out to NTT and Twitter for more information. In 2008 Twitter saw year-over-year traffic growth of 752 percent and from 2008 to 2009, traffic rose 1,358 percent. It serves 55 million tweets a day.
