Global CIO: Twitter Data Center Shows Vital Role Of IT OperationsGlobal CIO: Twitter Data Center Shows Vital Role Of IT Operations

Web 2.0 has spoken: IT infrastructure isn't a commodity.

Facebook earlier this year decided to build its own data center, and now Twitter is planning to break ground in Utah. With these moves, two pillars of Web 2.0 innovation send a crisp message that owning and running IT infrastructure can deliver a competitive advantage.

Twitter's decision is more than a simple rent-versus-buy financial calculation. This lies at the heart of the company's brand and growth ambitions. Twitter has become far too big and vital to give off a "such is life with startups" attitude toward outages and poor performance. Jean-Paul Cozzatti emphasizes control, reliability, and flexibility in announcing the decision:

Compare Twitter's experience to what eBay went through during its growth explosion more than a decade ago. By chance this morning, I read an interview from 10 years ago with eBay founder Pierre Omidyar (via Business Insider's Tip of the Day) that speaks to eBay's realization that its future hinged on having extraordinarily good IT infrastructure. Said Omidyar:

Twitter could take a different growth path than eBay, thanks to the highly evolved state of the IT outsourcing industry. It managed growth initially with cloud services including Joyent, then went to an outsourced collocation data center facility, which it will continue to use. But Twitter is arriving at the same destination as eBay, concluding that it's future hinges in part on running a world-class IT infrastructure highly tuned to its unique needs.

Are Facebook and Twitter outliers, the rare Web leviathans that can justify their own information factories? Not even close. Companies will take many tactics to their data centers, including outsourcing and infrastructure as a service cloud computing. But plenty of companies, from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange to JPMorgan Chase to Hewlett-Packard, also continue to invest in data centers as strategic assets they'll run themselves. Server virtualization is spurring the effort, letting companies cut their costs and reduce the number of physical data center buildings they need, making it more practical to keep this asset in house. Many CIOs, in fact, spent the downturn shoring up their IT infrastructures. JPMorgan Chase, for example, poured millions into upgrading its IBM mainframes.

Cloud computing is supposed to change this, making it easier for companies to push commodity computing outside its walls. And there's real interest in that. There's booming interest in cloud-based applications. But so far, when it comes to infrastructure, the greatest interest in cloud computing is in private clouds, according to our research. IT leaders are looking to harness the flexibility and scalability of cloud architecture inside a company's own data center. eBay itself will help push the development of private clouds, working hand-in-hand with Microsoft.

No doubt, CIOs will look for chances to push certain kinds of work, like testing and development, out of their data centers and into the cloud. Some will hand over every piece of operational IT they can. But many execs still see competitive advantage in running their own data centers, ones flexible and responsive enough to meet their changing needs. And that's likely to continue.

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