Twitter is Frozen, and Then Thaws

What if the real-time Internet gets stuck? That seems to be what happened for several hours today with Twitter, as a large number of users reported that their timelines were not updating. The problems appeared to clear up around 3 pm Eastern time, when updates returned to a more normal pattern.       

Twitter acknowledged the unusual problems. ”Timelines remain stale for users,” the service reported on its status page. “We are deploying fixes to address the problem.” During the episode, users were able to tweet, and some of those messages appeared on Twitter search and third-party services like FriendFeed, according to TechCrunch.

Who cares if a few million Tweets get stuck in the space/time continuum? As we’ve previously noted, Twitter has become an important secondary support channel for many hosting and data center providers. As such, the service’s continued reliability problems have business implications.

Roundup: Egenera, Consonus, DataSite

Here’s a roundup of some of some of this week’s headlines from the data center and hosting industry:

• Egenera Raises $3 million in new venture funds.  Data center hardware and software provider Egenera has been given $3 million in new venture capital funds, bringing a total of at least $180 million.  The Dell-Egenera partnership has been been very successful for Egenera and earlier this month they announced availability of the Dell PAN System 2.1.  Chief Marketing Officer Christine Crandell said Egenera plans to use the funds to boost efforts to create channel sales relationships for its server fault-tolerance and high availability products.
• Consonus announces cloud solution. North Carolina based Consonus announced a cloud computing solution designed for businesses that have rigorous uptime requirements but don’t have the capital or time to build additional capacity themselves.  The Consonus Virtual Infrastructure Service (VIS) is hosted and managed in a fully-redundant and secure SAS 70 Type II data center and features an integrated disaster recovery solution.  Data center and managed service provider Consonus has partnered with Infrastructure-as-a-service provider BlueLock to offer the new VIS program.

How Much of Twitter’s $100M is for Servers?

One of the hottest tech stories last week was the $100 million raised by Twitter in a new round of funding, which reportedly values the microblogging service at $1 billion, even though it has yet to generate meaningful revenue. Much of the commentary has focused  on the high valuation, but the funding begs another question: Did Twitter raise $100 million because it can, or because it really needs the money?

Some analysts foresee Twitter using the money to hire 200 to 500 developers, or to acquire some of the companies building apps and services atop the Twitter API. But the real answer to the “need vs. want” question may depend on how much Twitter is spending on the infrastructure to support its rapid growth.

Massive Scalability Never Cheap
By outsourcing its infrastructure to NTT America and Amazon Web Services, Twitter has undoubtedly spent far less on infrastructure than if it built its own data centers. But massive scability never comes cheap, and as Twitter has gone mainstream, the rapid growth in its user base has meant additional investment in servers to handle the load.

Twitter’s storage requirements aren’t as onerous as some other social media sites, such as  Facebook, which stores billions of photos and videos. Twitter’s storage output is primarily text (Tweets), avatars and background images. Twitter saves money on image storage by using Amazon S3, but as its user base moves into the tens of millions, those costs will start to add up quickly.

Lee Technologies Wins $7 Million Contract

Lee Technologies has been selected by Hosted Solutions to manage and execute the data center build out and re-design at its Charlotte Metro facility, the companies said today. The project, scheduled for completion in November, is valued at $7 million.

Hosted Solutions, which provides data center and managed hosting services, is expanding its 10,000 square foot facility by an additional 5,000 square feet to make room for future growth, and is also upgrading the facility’s power capacity.

“After working with Lee Technologies on the strategic build out of our Raleigh facility, we were fully confident their team was ideally suited to manage, execute and deliver the expansion and re-design of Hosted Solutions’ Charlotte Metro facility on time and on budget,” said Rich Lee, Founder and CEO, Hosted Solutions. “Our customers demand data centers engineered for maximum security and 100% uptime, and Lee Technologies enables us to deliver uninterrupted services and availability.”

Dell Acquires Perot Systems for $3.9 Billion

The racks inside a Perot Systems data center in Plano, Texas. Perot Systems is being acquired by Dell for $3.9 billion.

Dell is acquiring Perot Systems in a deal valued at $3.9 billion, the companies said this morning. The deal, which has been approved by the boards of both companies, follows months of hinting from Dell about making an acquisition to boost its data center business. The offer works out to $30 a share, a 68 percent premium over Friday’s close for Perot Systems.

Dell (DELL) said the acquisition will allow it to offer a broader range of IT services, and a built-in market for its hardware among Perot Systems’ existing customers. Perot Systems has a strong footprint in the health care and government, which provide 48 percent and 25 percent of its revenues, with the remainder in the enterprise sector. Those two sectors are expected to see strong growth due to the Obama administration’s economic stimulus plan, which is expected to boost the adoption of electronic health records and upgrades of federal agencies’ IT infrastructure.

In a press release, the companies said the deal “provides some compelling opportunities for improved efficiency,” a phrase with implications for the workforces of the two companies.

Hosted Solutions Targets App Hosting

Hosted Solutions has expanded its suite of application hosting and management capabilities, the company said today, including support for leading business applications, including Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, WebSphere, WebLogic and JBOSS. The move helped the company build upon its core colocation and managed services offerings, and work more closely with companies interested in outsourcing in-house applications.   

“By moving deeper into the stack and providing a greater range of services, such as applications hosting and support, we deliver greater value to our clients,” said Christopher “Kip” Turco, Hosted Solutions’ Chief Operating Officer. “They, in turn, are far more likely to regard us as their trusted partner, ready to help them solve a full scale of business challenges. We’ve seen a significant level of interest in this offering from our customers.”

Twitter in ‘Combat Mode’ As Attacks Continue

One of the famous Twitter error graphics (pre "Fail Whale"). Twitter has been enhancing its defenses against attacks.

Twitter has been the target of additional denial of service attacks in the wake of a major outage on Aug. 6, but enhanced defenses implemented by Twitter and NTT America have reduced their impact.

“We’ve been continually seeing attacks, but I think the public has not noticed because we’ve been mitigating them,” said Kazuhiro Gomi, Chief Operating Officer of NTT America, which hosts Twitter’s infrastructure. “We are definitely in combat mode, but handling it.”

Twitter was badly hobbled by the Aug. 6 attack, which also targeted Facebook and several other social media sites. In a recent interview, NTT America addressed the steps taken to harden Twitter’s defenses against these attacks, and addressed some criticisms of Twitter’s performance.

The Aug. 6 attack was a distributed denial of service (DDoS), in which “bot networks” of thousands of compromised computers are used to attack a site and overload its infrastructure – essentially clogging the pipes with too many requests at once. Network tools can be used to filter incoming traffic and deflect suspicious packets while forwarding “good” requests.

Defense Tools Turned On
These DDoS defense tools were available from NTT America, but Twitter did not have them in place at the time of the Aug. 6 attack. Once they were turned on, Twitter gradually improved its perfromance and returned to service. NTT America has since put some new defense mechanisms in place to address the unusual scope of recent attacks. These measures are not a customized solution for Twitter, but a broader hardening to protect all of NTT’s customers, the company said.

Red Hat Deltacloud, Ciena, Level 3, VYCON

Here’s a roundup of some of some of this week’s headlines from the data center and hosting industry:

• Red Hat introduces Deltacloud. Red Hat announced the initiation of a new open source project, named Deltacloud.  The goal is to enable an ecosystem of developers, tools, scripts, and applications which can interoperate across the public and private clouds. The deltacloud.org site defines itself as an API that abstracts the differences between clouds. Deltacloud provides REST API (simple, any-platform access), Amazon’s EC2, RHEV-M, VMware ESX and RackSpace (coming soon). The Deltacloud Portal web interface then provides a way to manage cloud instances, images and cloud to cloud migration.  Red Hat also had an announcement with HP today about optimizing Red Hat Enterprise virtualization for HP Blade System matrix.  The Red Hat Summit and JBoss World 2009 were held in Chicago September 1-4.
• Ciena Corporation posts $26.5 million quarterly loss. Network equipment provider Ciena reported a $26.5 million loss Thursday, as telecommunications companies cut back on capital expenditures.  Ciena recorded $164.8 million in revenue for the quarter, down 35% from $253 million in the same quarter of 2008.  The $164.8 million 3rd quarter revenue is up, from $144.2 million last quarter.  The company expects fourth quarter revenue to be “roughly flat with the third quarter revenue.”

Twitter’s Growth Drives NTT Expansion

Driven by the rapid growth of Twitter, NTT America is expanding its data center footprint. NTT America confirmed today that it has leased 15,000 square feet of data center space in Santa Clara, citiing “rapidly growing customer demand” for data center resources.

That capacity crunch has been driven by Twitter, which outsources its infrastructure to NTT America through a managed hosting agreement. Twitter experienced 752 percent traffic growth in 2008, but that was nothing compared to the traffic explosion in the first half of 2009, as the microblogging service went mainstream and was widely adopted by celebrities and a growing number of businesses.

NTT America Chief Operating Office Kazuhiro Gomi said in June that “traffic generated by Twitter is getting so big, it’s basically eating up a lot of our data center network resources, especially the segment where Twitter is hosted. Other customers are riding on the same segment” in the company’s primary data center in San Jose, he said.