Twitter’s New Data Center? C7 Opens New Site

Salt Lake City colocation provider C7 Data Centers may refer to its new facility as its Bluffdale data center. But elsewhere it's already being called the new Twitter data center. Unofficially, of course.

C7 said this week that it has opened a new 65,000 square foot facility in Bluffdale, Utah with 40,000 square feet of available data center space. The company says that 15,000 square feet of the space at its new site has already been sold or reserved. "Several large companies have already signed multi-year agreements to move into the facility including an anchor tenant," C7 said in a press release.

Twitter Chooses Salt Lake City
C7 Data Centers didn't name any of its customers, but Twitter is the prime suspect as the mystery anchor tenant. In July, Twitter said it will build its first custom data center in the Salt Lake City market, which will allow the microblogging service to better manage its growth and "unique power and cooling needs." Local media subsequently identified C7 as Twitter's data center provider, and have named Twitter as the anchor tenant in Bluffdale.

So is it Twitter? "We're still not commenting on the specific location or other details about our data center," said Twitter's Matt Graves.

Twitter currently manages its infrastructure through a managed hosting agreement with NTT America, which has cited Twitter’s growth as a driver in the expansion of its data center network.

The opening of the new C7 facility doesn't mean tenants are ready to launch production, only that the space is open and ready for immediate occupancy.The rest of the data center will be built out in phases over the next 18 months in pods of 10,000 square feet. The facility has been built to include 36-inch raised floors, has 10 megawatts of power capacity, and connectivity from three national bandwidth providers.

Growing Data Center Cluster
Twitter is the fourth high-profile data center project to locate in the Salt Lake City area in recent years, following the lead of eBay, Oracle Corp. and the NSA.

C7 Data Centers CEO Nathan Hatch said companies continue to select Utah for colocation and business continuance because of its low operational costs, and low incidence of natural disasters. “C7 continues to attract companies requiring scalable, world-class data center space,” said Hatch. “Providing real value at a competitive price resonates with prospective customers and our installed client base.”