Last week Twitter announced they were working on a new data center in the Salt Lake City area. I live in Sandy, Utah (about 30 minutes drive south of SLC) so I saw plenty of local talk about this new development.
No word publicly on where the location of the new data center will be, though The Salt Lake Tribune reports on speculation of a Bluffdale location. From a work force stand point that is a nice location, with fairly easy access to both Salt Lake and Utah counties (two of the main population centers in Utah).
Data center issues sure have changed over the years. It used to be that getting access to a high capacity facility meant going to where the bandwidth was (remember when MAE-West as king?). Bringing high capacity connections out to other areas was difficult and expensive. Now other operation costs have become the major issues, like how to keep thousands of servers cool.
From the perspective of cooling a SLC data center certainly makes sense. We’ve had snow at my house as early as September and as late as May. I wouldn’t be surprised if for half the year they won’t need any air conditioning at all, simply vent out the hot air and bring in the outside air. Check out the average monthly temperatures for Sandy and you’ll see what I’m talking about. Those are just the averages, there are a number of days during the winter where the high was below 25. Last winter it wasn’t unusual for it to be in the low single digits when I took Alice to school in the morning.
I’ve seen a few people speculate that Twitter will be bringing developer resources to the SLC area as well. I don’t see that as being very likely. I expect that their developers will still be mostly based in San Francisco. The Twitter jobs that do come to SLC will be nearly all operational in nature. Exactly how many jobs? I have no idea, but there are plenty of universities and colleges in the area that will be looking for the answer to that question as well.
I’m curious to see how this plays out, potentially it could be very good for SLC. And as a long time systems and network geek I have a special place in my heart for big buildings with lots of servers, routers, switches, and networking cable. Oh, and Evan Williams, if you are reading this, I’d love to get a tour of your new data center when it is done. 🙂
Update:
Ash Buckles mentions that the Twitter DC is next door to seo.com ( next door, confirmed ). That would be with in the ball park of the Bluffdale rumor, just off I-15 about 15 minutes drive south of my house.
Here’s the seo.com location:
This makes me curious about the network connectivity situation. And will this attract other DCs to the area?