Twitter and Facebook Announce Major Strategic Data Center Moves
Facebook moves Data Center to Prineville
Facebook is growing at a very rapid rate. It has become the 12th largest site on the Internet. Its traffic has grown 725 percent from 2008 to 1,358 in 2009. In the past, Facebook has leased space from wholesale data centers like DuPont Fabros Technologies, Fortune Data Centers and Digital Realty Trust. Now Facebook is in the process of opening its new facility in Prineville, Oregon. The estimated cost is somewhere around $180 to 215 Million dollars on the 147,000-square-foot facility. It selected Prineville, Oregon for several reasons including low power cost. Prineville is in one of the state’s long term rural enterprise zones. This makes it exempt from local property taxes during its construction period and could fully exempt the data center for up to 15 years after the sites is completed. Facebook did apply for a 10 year waiver of all excise taxes and income taxes as provide under the Oregon Investment Advantage program. Prineville has a dry climate which is perfect for Facebook’s evaporative cooling system that will keep power costs down. They will use Pacific Power to supply electricity to the data center. Pacific Power uses mostly coal to generate its power.
Twitter Announces Data Center Plans
Twitter recently announced plans to either move into leased space at a wholesale data center or into its own data center. Twitter as experience explosive growth similar to Facebook. In 2008 it grew 752 percent and in 2009 it increased by 1350 percent which equates to about 600 million searches per day and over 50 million Tweets.
Twitter has outsourced its infrastructure to NTT America through a managed hosting agreement and in the past used Amazon’s cloud computing services to store and deploy images. Now John Adams of the Twitter operations team announced plans to move away from NTT America’s data centers. NTT America said that traffic generated by Twitter has basically eating up a lot of resources in their data center.
What is unclear at this point is NTT America’s announcement last August that it leased 15,000 square feet of expansion space in Santa Clara, California due to the explosive growth of Twitter. Twitter in turn signed an agreement to host its equipment at the new facility because of high latency issues with the cloud. While on the surface Twitter’s announcement appears to conflict with the past announcement move from NTT America, Twitter could be projecting their future long range plans since building and running its own data center would take at least a couple years to complete. More information on this data center move should be coming out over the next few months.
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