Oct 09, 2009

Open Letter to Twitter: Can We Help?

by Kyle Flaherty

Dear Twitter,

In December 2006 I jumped onto Twitter, not realizing the impact it would have on my life. Twitter helped introduce me to Pam O’Neal (@poneal) at BreakingPoint (@breakingpoint) and subsequently move my family from Boston to Austin to work here. Now, each day at BreakingPoint, we use Twitter (30%+ of our employees are registered) to communicate with our community of server load testing professionals and network and security engineers, as well as communicate amongst one another.

As a company, BreakingPoint recognized the potential of Twitter early and in 2008, even added a product feature to test the ability of network devices' and application servers' to handle the load of Twitter traffic. Our team has worked for decades developing the latest in networking and data center technology and they know first-hand how hard it can be to sustain a reliable network and service. It is why they created a better network and load testing solution.

Yesterday, when Twitter was down due to a "bug triggered by an edge case in one of the core services", I thought about how important Twitter had become to our business and me. I watched the predictable posts complaining about the fail whale and it hit me; rather than throwing criticism, I would be best served getting my hands dirty and helping with the problem. An idea surfaced, which I talked through with our CTO and co-founder Dennis Cox (@denniscox), and the green flag was waved.

BreakingPoint wants to help Twitter by providing the use of its server load testing product and wicked smart folks (sorry, the Boston still in me) to help assure the resiliency of your company's network devices, servers and overall data center infrastructure. We want to provide the use of our BreakingPoint Elite, combined with a team of experts, many of them industry-recognized resources in security, Ruby, software engineering and load testing. As your company will see, we can provide server load testing on the scale a service like Twitter would need. I can have someone from our San Francisco office meet with your team today if needed (and I can be on the next flight).

BreakingPoint is a huge fan of Twitter and hopes that it can help! I've included the Twitter profiles for some of our team below. We are all looking forward to working with your company.

		denniscox - Dennis Cox CTO and founder of @breakingpoint			tmanning - Todd Manning Author of @breakingpoint Twitter testing protocol
		todb - Tod Beardsley @breakingpoint "protocol monkey" (his words, not mine)			poneal - Pam Oneal Vice President of Marketing @breakingpoint

		mikehamilton - Michael Hamilton Product Marketing @breakingpoint			kkuehl -Kirby Kuehl Writes protocol (de\|en)coders in C/C++ @breakingpoint
		jgstroud - Jonathan Stroud Hardware design @breakingpoint			druidian - I)ruid @breakingpoint Labs
		chrisfenton - Chris Fenton @breakingpoint--West Region			KyleFlaherty - Kyle Flaherty Communications for @breakingpoint

Many thanks for everything your company has provided our community,

@kyleflaherty

UPDATE: I'd be remiss if I didn't also link to @busterbcook and @rhythmx, two more great BreakingPoint Tweeters!

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