Twitter plans to open new data center in Salt Lake City area

SALT LAKE CITY — Twitter Inc. announced Wednesday that it will open a new, custom-built data center in the Salt Lake City area later this year.

Jean-Paul Cozzatti, the company's engineering program manager, posted a Twitter message at 4:22 p.m. announcing that the San Francisco-based company's technical operations will move to Salt Lake to help keep up with a growing user base that has more than 300,000 people signing up for the social networking site every day.

"Finally, Twitter's custom data center is built for high availability and redundancy in our network and systems infrastructure," Cozzatti's post states. "This first Twitter-managed data center is being designed with a multi-homed network solution for greater reliability and capacity."

Twitter spokesman Matt Graves said the new center will be Twitter's first custom-built data center and is in addition to the data center in which the company currently has its network and systems infrastructure.

"We will open other custom-built data centers over the next 24 months," he said in an e-mail.

Cozzatti's post referenced a talk that John Adams, lead engineer for Twitter's application services, gave in June at the O'Reilly Velocity conference, when he explained how more users tweeting via iPhone, Facebook or other applications makes it difficult for Twitter to keep up.

"Keeping pace with these users and their Twitter activity presents some unique and complex engineering challenges," Cozzatti also says in the post. "Having dedicated data centers will give us more capacity to accommodate this growth in users and activity on Twitter."

— Lana Groves