Feeding the Twitter Beast with NTT America

(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- The folks at NTT America’s (www.nttamerica.com) data centers in Silicon Valley don’t need to click on CNN.com to know when a huge, news making event is happening. It could be a terrorist attack in the Middle East. Or a big play during the Super Bowl. Or a spirited exchange during a high-profile election debate. All the staffers have to do is look at the monitors that track traffic numbers for a client of theirs: Twitter (www.twitter.com).

“We see this all the time,” says Kazu Gomi, chief operating officer at NTT America, which is headquartered in New York City. “An event happens and traffic increases. There’s no one single kind of event that makes it go up either. It can be completely random.”

It never hurts to set aside some extra space for such a customer – especially since Twitter’s traffic is still growing by leaps and bounds, and the general population of Web 2.0 companies serviced by NTT in Northern California is also seeing strong growth patterns. NTT now has about 60 employees in the region, about twice the number from five years ago. Those employees are servicing such strong demand that NTT has opened a second data center in Santa Clara, Calif., adding 15,000 square feet of space to bring its total amount in the region to 150,000 square feet. The site is earthquake-proof (up to seismic zone four specs), and equipped with redundant power feeds and water-cooling systems. It’s supported by multiple 10-gigabit circuits that interconnect to NTT America’s Tier 1 backbone.

NTT execs say the extra space is enough to handle the traffic, for now. It added San Francisco-based Twitter as a customer in early 2008, back when it was another in a crowd of social media companies that had strong growth potential and realized that it needed a more stable service provider.

“We always like to focus on customers with great growth potential,” says Stephen Bloom, vice president of business development. “At some point, we made a connection with Twitter, which was looking for a reliable hosting company at the time. Twitter was on the move at the time, but no one could have ever anticipated the rapid growth they have seen over the past year and a half.”

Within that time, Twitter has emerged as a cultural touchstone.

For those still on the sidelines of the social media revolution, Twitter is the San Francisco-based service that stirred an Internet sensation by essentially taking a less-is-more approach to blogging (“microblogging” being the applicable buzzword), with messages (known as “tweets”) that are limited to 140 characters. To put this into context with respect to brevity, the sentence you’re reading right now has 135 characters and only 22 words. That’s too long for Twitter.

Rather than finding the format stifling, the service’s fans have embraced it as liberating. Cubicle dwellers tweet about their latest accomplishments, sublime or mundane, and essentially write an online biography of themselves in real time in the process. President Obama tweeted constantly during his campaign, as part of his multi-outlet social-network profile strategy. The top boldfaced names in Hollywood and sports turn to Twitter to announce new releases, engagements, breakups, births and game-day predictions. IT companies now tweet regularly to build buzz about their products, as do old school corporations like Wal-Mart, Chevron and Home Depot. The NFL faces controversy, in fact, over an internal debate not over whether players should be allowed to Tweet - but whether they should tweet during the games.

Given the craze it’s created, Twitter continues to gain a massive number of users every hour. It saw a more than 750 percent increase in traffic in 2008. Growth has continued going strong, with the site more than doubling its growth in March, by 131 percent to 9.3 million visitors, according to industry tracker comScore.

For NTT, growth from Twitter, social media companies and other customers has been accelerating, leading to the leasing of additional data center space elsewhere in the valley. To ensure uptime for Twitter and other customers, NTT taps highly reliable redundant power feeds, cooling and network connectivity with abundant growth capacity. All of which are needed for such a unique growth market.

“They’re a big hit now, and growing exponentially,” Gomi says. “Other typical IT companies grow, but in a much more moderate way. With a customer like Twitter, we need to talk to them constantly and find out what kind of demand they’re seeing, so we can prepare to create the kind of capacity that will handle the traffic.”

Another challenge: Twitter, along with other social-network sites such as Facebook, experienced Internet “denial of service” attacks in August that shut down the site for a reported two hours. NTT’s prevention systems constantly monitor Twitter traffic for the bad packets that circulate among the good, dropping them before they can do damage.

“It’s a constant challenge,” Gomi says. “You need to make sure you have the right mitigating mechanisms in place, and that your filtering system is doing its job.”

Like any company experiencing great growth, Twitter is interested in increased globalization, another need that makes its partnership with NTT more appealing. With its roots in Japan and the surrounding Asian region, NTT already has the resources in place to help Web 2.0 players build their presence there and in any other part of the world they seek to grow.

“We have facilities and engineering support in Asia, New York and everywhere else,” Bloom says. “It’s part of the trend with many customers that they start out in the US and expand from there. We make it possible for customers to acquire the very same services in Asia, Europe and other regions that they get here in America.”

Gomi and Bloom actually don’t have to look at an NTT monitor to know what kind of uptime they’re providing to Twitter because - you guessed it - they tweet too. But most often about their after-work activities.

“If I’m tweeting,” Bloom says, with a chuckle, “it’s usually to share something funny that one of my kids said that day.”

Source:
http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/091809_Feeding_the_Twitter_Beast_with_NTT_America

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