Report: Twitter's new data centre

Speculation was mounting that a new data centre based in Salt Lake City, Utah was to be the new home to micro-blogging site Twitter.

Twitter in July announced that it would move to a new custom-built data centre in the Salt Lake City area "later this year" that could take the heat its servers generated following several previous outages.

Twitter would have a larger footprint in the data centre and be able to manage its service levels better, it said, following several previous outages.

News of Twitter's data centre came on the back of C7 Data Centers' announcement that it had opened a new space in Salt Lake City Tuesday.

C7 had one "anchor client" in its 20,000 square metre Tier 3 facility, which had 13,000 square metres of space to spare.

The already-taken 7,000 square metres of space was reportedly leased by "several" multi-year tenants it had already signed up.

Local newspaper The Salt Lake Tribune reported Tuesday that the new data centre was definitely home to Twitter; however neither Twitter nor C7 had confirmed the deal.

The same reporter in July claimed that C7 was asked by Twitter not to disclose its business partner status in the project.

But the state's governor Gary Herbert appeared not to face the same contractual restraints as Twitter's alleged business partner, C7.

Herbert tweeted from his Blackberry back in July: "Twitter is coming to Utah! Great news for our growing software and technology clusters. Economic development is happening in Utah."

According to US data centre news website Datacenter Knowledge, Twitter's presence in Utah would put it alongside Oracle, eBay and the US National Security Agency in establishing compute capacity in the state.

The move coincided with Twitter's plans to monetise the micro-blogging site through advertising.

Twitter co-founder Evan Williams recently appointed Dick Costello as its CEO to allow Williams to focus on strategy.