115-degree day overheats Twitter data facility in Sacramento
SACRAMENTO - Twitter has several data centers across the country, including here in Sacramento, but according to a CNN report, last week's heat wave overheated the facility.
We reached out to Twitter which tells us service was not interrupted in the area but what does this mean for the future of the company in Northern California?
"When you hear Twitter meltdown you think of celebs and politicians, not their actual data centers," says Jeff Denworth, who is the co-founder of Vastdata, a company focused on data storage infrastructure.
According to a CNN report, Twitter's Sacrameno-based data center overheated during last week's heat wave.
"For your data center to overheat is a pretty special event," says Denworth,
"An average data center is composed of servers used to process application information," he says.
But on September 5, the local temperature reached 115, and Twitter's Sacramento systems failed.
"The internal temp of the center got to a point where the organization felt it could no longer keep servers online," says Denworth.
Twitter tells CBS13 that users in Northern California were not affected.
"When Sacramento gets shut down for overheating those customers get rerouted to Portland and Atlanta," says Denworth, but with temperatures on the rise, Denworth says the threat of the surrounding centers also shutting down could be imminent.
"What you never hope for Is cascading failure across multiple data centers. The whole service goes down," he says.
So what are the solutions? Denworth says moving the center to a cooler climate is an option but unlikely as the platform's proximity to users is important but pulling some equipment out could help with energy use.
"They make look at the non-corp workload and move them to place with cooler geography. It would probably alleviate the power grid a bit…them moving out could bring a fair bit of benefit to the Sac community," says Denworth.
We did reach out to Twitter and SMUD to ask about the response to the overheated facility and steps forward. We did immediately not hear back