NTT Expands Data Center Capabilities Spurred by Twitter Growth

NTT America, the US subsidiary of Japan's partly state owned NTT Communications Corporation, the largest telco in Asia and the second largest in the world, has announced it is expanding its data center capacity with a new location in Santa Clara, California in response to “rapidly growing customer demand.” While it doesn't explicitly name it in the press release, the demand is driven by Twitter's meteoric growth.

Twitter outsources its entire infrastructure to NTT America, which handles the hosting and the bandwidth needs of the growing microblogging site. In the early days Twitter was well known for its reliability problems, prompting its users to coin the phrase “fail whale” in reference to the whale image displayed when the site would encounter problems.

The company finally moved to NTT America in early 2008 to handle all its infrastructure needs and has had a much improved record since. The partnership between the two surfaced on several occasions, first when NTT delayed some planned maintenance work for Twitter in the light of the events unfolding in Iran and more recently during the massive DDoS attack that took down the microblogging site and affected a number of high-profile services like Facebook or LiveJournal.

While many believe that, with Twitter's rapid growth, the company would move to its own data center at some point, it looks like, at least for the foreseeable future, the partnership is here to stay and Twitter will continue to let NTT handle that part of its business, which the telecommunications company seems more than happy to do.

“The Silicon Valley technology corridor is an important market for customers who require enterprise-grade data center facilities for their corporate IT infrastructure,” Kazuhiro Gomi, NTT America's COO, said. “Our data center expansion enables us to provide customers with a Tier III colocation facility and the flexibility to add managed services to meet current and changing needs. We are delighted to extend NTT America’s high standards of IT infrastructure, security and performance to customers in our new Santa Clara data center.”