The Downtime Is Back at Twitter

The improved performance at Twitter in recent months has led some observers (including DCK) to applaud the microblogging service’s new-found stability. It seems we spoke too soon. Twitter was down yesterday, and   unavailable again for several hours today (as documented by Pingdom).

The service, which became renowned for both its addictive nature and frequent downtime, has seen its traffic surge amid interest in the U.S. election, leading TechCrunch to observe that Twitter “is approaching escape velocity. If it doesn’t break up from all the pressure and is able to keep its service up and running more or less, it could soon - gasp! - break into the mainstream.”   

The Twitter team has given its users something to blog about while they’re gone in the form of a bizarre graphic that has replaced the oft-mocked “Fail Whale.” One more to add to the gallery of Twitter 404 art.

Roundup: Savvis, CA, CyrusOne, Tideway

Here’s a roundup of data center news from around the industry:

• Savvis Inc. (SVVS) has upgraded its connectivity with major global financial exchanges, electronic communications networks (ECNs) and liquidity markets. The company said the moves were a response to growing customer demand for low latency connectivity solutions for electronic trading. “We are focused on understanding our customers existing and evolving IT infrastructure and market data needs particularly in today’s volatile marketplace,”said Varghese Thomas, Savvis Vice President, Financial Services Business Unit. The new connectivity options expand Savvis’access to exchange feeds NYSE Euronext, NASDAQ OMX Group, BATS, CME Group and the London Stock Exchange.
• CA Inc. (CA) today unveiled its Data Center Automation Manager to help enterprise IT organizations and cloud computing providers deliver, scale, and manage dynamic computing resources on demand. The product  enables real-time provisioning and performance management between on-premise and off-premise clouds.
• Managed hosting provider CyrusOne announced today that Halliburton (HAL) has selected the company, as its strategic data center partner to service its mission-critical IT infrastructure needs. Halliburton will relocate and consolidate its hardware systems to occupy several thousand square feet of data center space in CyrusOne’s newly constructed facility in Lewisville, Texas.
• IT automation software company Tideway has launched the beta version of Tideway Foundation Community Edition, a free downloadable version of the company’s automated discovery and application dependency mapping software. Users can now use Tideway Foundationfor free in their own IT environment to accelerate cost-saving initiatives like server consolidation, virtualization, and data center migrations. Foundation automates data center discovery to provide a complete, accurate inventory of all servers, software and applications, as well as crucial inter-system dependencies and relationships.

Roundup: Data Center Announcements

There have been a number of announcements of new data center projects in the past week, reflecting continued activity in a challenging environment. Here’s a roundup:

• Online broker Scottrade announced a new data center in the Phoenix market. The 20,000 square foot facility will serve as a backup site for the company’s primary data center in St. Louis.
• The Department of Veterans Affairs will build a $32 million data center in Martinsburg, West Virginia. The 66,000 square foot facility will employee 120 workers.
• Limestone Networks opened a new dedicated hosting facility in the DataBank building in downtown Dallas, which was previously home to the Dallas branch of the Federal Reserve Bank.
• Web hosting company Site Ox said it has opened a new data center in Franklin, Tennessee, just south of Nashville. 
• Internet Initiative Japan (IIJ) said it will open a new data center in Nerima district of Tokyo in March 2009.

Roundup: Terremark, CRG West, Hosted Solutions

Here’s a roundup of some of this week’s data center industry headlines:

• Terremark Worldwide, Inc. (TMRK) announced that VeriSign, Inc. (VRSN) has deployed additional infrastructure in Terremark’s Madrid facility, the NAP de las Americas Madrid. The expansion is part of VeriSign’s Project Titan initiative to strengthen and secure its global Internet infrastructure.
• Mzima has expanded its footprint with CRG West, the two companies said this week (PDF). Mzima now has a presence in CRG West data centers in five markets: Chicago, New York, Northern Virginia, the San Francisco Bay area and Los Angeles. 
• Hosted Solutions will provide Comprehensive NeuroScience with a fully managed infrastructure, including managed firewall, intrusion detection, dedicated servers, storage, and backups. Comprehensive NeuroScience helps state policymakers and physicians improve the quality of care for mental illness.

Fortrust Completes $30 Million Expansion

Denver colocation and disaster recovery specialist Fortrust has completed a $30 million expansion of its data center, bringing its raised-floor colocation capacity to more than 48,000 square feet. The company’s data center investment now exceeds $100 million without incurring debt, the company said.

“Our total investment signals that we’re focused on providing our customers with the most technologically advanced and secure environment to colocate their IT infrastructure and protect their data,” said Steve Knudson, Fortrust’s chief executive officer. “We’re in this business for the long-term, and this type of investment is key to maintaining our status as a leading data center services provider in the Rocky Mountain region. It is important for our customers to know that we can scale to meet their business needs along with our own in a financially secure manner.”

Remembering Exodus

Exodus Communications left its imprint on the data center industry. It had the highest profile of any of the data center builders during the dot-com boom, and made the loudest thud when it filed for bankruptcy in 2001. Exodus’ “gold-plated” data centers lived on, getting bought or leased by companies including Savvis, Google, DuPont Fabros, Cable & Wireless, Sabey Corp., Freddie Mac, Deutsche Bank and many others. A LinkedIn group for Exodus Alumni has more than 1,000 members.

So I thought our readers might in Sramana Mitra’s interview with Exodus founder B.V. Jagadeesh, who is now the CEO of i/o virtualization company 3Leaf Systems. Jagdeesh discusses the development and history of Exodus, including its move into its first major facility, a 15,000 square foot site in Santa Clara:

That was the true birth of the Internet datacenter. In August of 1996 we were halfway through our move, and there was a massive power failure west of Utah because of a grid failure. This area was badly affected. We had a generator, so our brilliant marketing guy made a very big deal of it. BBN, which was based in Palo Alto, went down. They were a government-funded facility and they went down. We had ads blasting in the newspaper, ‘When the whole world went down, Exodus had the lights on.’

The interview appears in six segments, with the discussion of Exodus starting in part three, and continuing in parts four and five. Jagadeesh left the company in 2000 to work at NetScaler.

Tough Time for Recent Tech IPOs

Recent sessions on Wall Street have been particularly tough for data center companies who have gone public in the last several years, all of which are at all-time lows:

• Shares of VMware dropped below $20 yesterday, closing at $19.97. VMW went public last August at $29 a share, and traded as high as $124 last fall.
• Rackspace Hosting (RAX) starts the day at $5.75, less than half the $12.50 pricing of its Aug. 8 IPO. Rackspace was the only venture-backed IPO during the third quarter.
• Switch and Data (SDXC), which went public in Feb. 2007 at $17 a share, has been particularly hard-hit in recent sessions and closed yesterday at $6.41 a share.
• Stock of DuPont Fabros Technology (DFT) has slid to $7.07 a share. The data center REIT went public in Oct. 2007 at $21 a share.

Roundup: H5 Colo, Emerson, Center 7

It’s been a busy week for data center news, so here’s a roundup of news and links from the data center industry:

• McKnight Development has launched a new company to develop data centers in the Dallas market, according to BizJournals.  The real estate firm formed H5 Colo, which is developing 51,000 square feet of data center space in the 220,000-square-foot Park Central IV building.
• Emerson Network Power is integrating Future Facilities’ 6SigmaDC computational fluid dynamics (CFD) tools with its Aperture VISTA infrastructure management system. “These developments support our strategy to aggressively develop more sophisticated tools and services to help global businesses manage the increasing complexity of their data center infrastructure,” said Fred Stack, vice president of marketing at Emerson’s Liebert Precision Cooling unit.
• Center 7, Inc. announced that Access Technology Solutions, a provider of eCommerce logistics and technology, has signed a multi-year agreement to utilize Center 7’s data protection and hosting facilities.

Roundup: Hosting.com, Peak 10, Sisters of Mercy

Here’s a roundup of data center industry news released yesterday:

• Hosting.com said it has completed its expansion in San Francisco, where it has added 7,000 square feet of high-density colocation space.
• Peak 10 is opening a 22,000-square-foot data center in West Chester, Ohio, which will be Peak 10’s 12th facility in nine mid-Southern cities
• The Sisters of Mercy religious order has hired S. M. Wilson & Co. to build a $35 million medical data center in Washington, Mo.

Roundup: Equinix, Rackspace, Active Power

Here’s a roundup of data center industry news from released Monday:

• Equinix (EQIX) and Japan Internet Exchange Co. Ltd. (JPIX), the largest Internet exchange in Japan, have  announced that JPIX has extended its peering fabricto the Equinix Tokyo-2  data center located in Shinagawa. As a part of the agreement, Equinix customers will be able to directly exchange traffic with JPIX’s diverse aggregation of Internet service providers, cable TV service providers and content providers.
• Rackspace (RAX) released a survey in which nearly 50 percent of customer respondents said that they expect the percentage of IT budgets spent on hosted services to increase over the next five years. “Two thirds of the survey respondents use a services provider to host one or more of their SaaS applications today and the data indicates that demand is likely to increase,” said John Engates, chief technology officer, Rackspace Hosting.
• Active Power (ACPW) announced the shipment of its 2,000th flywheel UPS (uninterruptible power supply) system, which was purchased by Caterpillar Inc. (CAT) to support an application in the solar power sector. Active Power has now deployed more than 500 megawatts of flywheel UPS power protection to customers around the world.