Twitter doesn’t plan on the fail whale coming out to play as often, with a decision to move its technical operations infrastructure to a new data center. Located in the Salt Lake City area, the custom-built data center will give Twitter room to grow and have more control over its operations.

It’s a significant sign of growth for the microblogging site, as it looks to manage the continued growth and expansion of its services. Not only does Twitter continue to gain users, but those users continue to tweet. A lot. The data center itself will have a larger footprint in a building designed to handle Twitter’s needs, with the company able to control its network and systems. Twitter plans on a mixed-vendor environment, running open source operating systems and applications on its servers.

The pinch for Twitter was felt most recently with the World Cup fiasco, as Twitter unsurprisingly suffered from down time multiple times a day. Given the magnitude of the public outages during such a large sporting event, the pressure was really on for Twitter to get some things pulled together (it didn’t help that Twitter was pushing through upgrades at the time). From Twitter,

“Finally, Twitter’s custom data center is built for high availability and redundancy in our network and systems infrastructure. This first Twitter managed data center is being designed with a multi-homed network solution for greater reliability and capacity. We will continue to work with NTT America to operate our current footprint, and plan to bring additional Twitter managed data centers online over the next 24 months.”

Aside from servers and data centers, Twitter has spent the last year gaining control over much of its network. Taking over many of the functions of popular Twitter apps and, in some cases, acquiring them to do so, Twitter’s plans towards becoming a “real” business are coming to fruition. The move for its own data center implies that Twitter expects continued growth, and would like a better infrastructure for the coming year and beyond. This will come into play as social data is continually called upon for search purposes as well.

Facebook made similar measures during its early growth, expanding to data centers up and down the east coast. The social network broke ground on its custom data center earlier this year as well.

[image credit: laughingmeme]