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"Fail Whales" cartoon icon greets frustrated users during outages at new facility in Utah with leaky roof and inadequate power
| ALEXEI ORESKOVIC |
Published: 2011/04/04 07:22:44 AM |
AN AMBITIOUS plan to prevent Fail Whales, the cartoon icon that greets frustrated Twitter users during network outages, has turned into a fail whale of its own.
A new, custom-built facility in Utah, meant to house computers that power the popular messaging service by the end of last year, has been plagued with everything from leaky roofs to insufficient power capacity, people familiar with the plans told Reuters.
The botched move threatened new product development and forced Twitter — whose user accounts have burgeoned to 200-million in just five years — to seek another location, despite committing significant investment to the facility.
People familiar with the matter said the move was to an existing Sacramento facility more than 965km away, owned by co- location company Raging Wire, rather than into the custom-built data centre in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Twitter had signed a $24m , four-year minimum commitment lease with C7 Data Centres which was building the Utah centre .
It was not immediately clear if any of the fees would be returned or if it planned to pay out the full term of the contract.
Twitter declined to comment about its data centres or finances. Twitter vice-president of engineering, Michael Abbott, said the company has done more to upgrade its infrastructure in the last six months than it did in the previous 4½ years.
"Twitter now has the team and infrastructure in place to capitalise on the tremendous interest in Twitter and continue our record growth," Mr Abbott said.
Google and Yahoo spend anywhere from $50m to $2,5b n to construct and equip such data centres, according to Forrester Research analyst James Staten.
Last month, Twitter hired eBay’s Mazen Rawashdeh as vice-president of operations — a job that sources say did not exist at Twitter in July last year when it announced plans to move its operations infrastructure.
For Twitter, which had been renting servers from hosting provider NTT America for several years, moving into its own data centre was a milestone.
Within months of Twitter’s July announcement though, it was quietly moving many of its servers out of Salt Lake City and instead shipping all new gear from Sacramento.
Twitter concluded that the Utah facility had failed to meet its needs, these sources said.
The centre initially lacked key features such as a second fibre network connection, and less than half of the electricity was actually available. The roof leaked water onto server cabinets with every rain, forcing staffers to move equipment out of harm’s way, sources said.
C7 president Wes Swenson declined to confirm Twitter as a customer but defended his company’s work at the centre. He said 5MW of power were available from day one and the building had a brand new roof once construction was over in October.
"We experience less than 1% churn in our customer base," Mr Swenson said. "But sometimes we deal with companies that are not very sophisticated; often times a lot of customers that have never owned their own equipment may go through a learning curve."
Twitter’s decision to move its data centre to Sacramento affected product plans as management enforced a several month moratorium on launching big new features.
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