For nearly a decade, Dropbox has run its own hardware infrastructure. We have one of the few exabyte-scale storage systems in the world, and running infrastructure at this scale takes a lot of time and planning to build and maintain. Our Hardware team architects, ships, and maintains all of the physical hardware in the data centers that keep Dropbox online, and we recently hit an exciting milestone: we shipped our sixth generation hardware designs. | dropbox.tech
Years ago, we called Dropbox a “Magic Pocket” because it was designed to keep all your files in one convenient place. Dropbox has evolved from that simple beginning to become one of the most powerful and ubiquitous collaboration platforms in the world. And when our scale required building our own dedicated storage infrastructure, we named the project “Magic Pocket.” Two and a half years later, we’re excited to announce that we’re now storing and serving over 90% of our users’ da...| dropbox.tech
We’ve received a lot of positive feedback since announcing Magic Pocket, our in-house multi-exabyte storage system. We’re going to follow that announcement with a series of technical blog posts that offer a look behind the scenes at interesting aspects of the system, including our protection mechanisms, operational tooling, and innovations on the boundary between hardware and software. But first, we’ll need some context: in this post, we’ll give a high level architectural o...| dropbox.tech
At Dropbox, AI-powered tools and features are quickly transforming the way our customers find, organize, and understand their data. Dropbox Dash brings AI-powered universal search to all your apps, browser tabs, and cloud docs, while Dropbox AI can summarize and answer questions about the content of your files. To meet the bandwidth requirements of new and future AI workloads—and stay committed to our sustainability goals—the Dropbox networking team recently designed and launched our firs...| dropbox.tech
In 2018, Dropbox became the first major tech company to adopt high-density SMR (shingled magnetic recording) technology for our storage drives. By 2019, our SMR fleet size was around 25%. Today, a staggering 90% of our total HDD fleet size is now SMR capable, and we’ve continued to lead the industry in adoption with the deployment of two additional SMR hard drive models. | dropbox.tech