In the hardware industry we call these snowflakes. This means we would have to design and maintain more than 100 unique hardware configurations at any one time. If you don’t have many services, this approach makes sense-but at Dropbox there are more than 100, and that number keeps increasing. This is sort of like designing a high-performance sports car that’s optimized for speed, but not as well suited for running errands or dropping your kids off at school. One approach is to tailor the server to each service. When designing server configurations there are many different approaches. This provided an opportunity to control our own destiny in terms of cost and performance, which allows us to serve our customers better. When we started work on Magic Pocket in 2013, the hardware team decided to do all of our infrastructure engineering in-house. We were early adopters of Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) storage drives and new CPU technology from AMD, and we’re excited about the possibility of leveraging machine learning accelerators and heat-assisted magnetic recording in the future.īut first, let’s take a closer look at what’s running in our data centers today. Often, that means making innovative bets on new and emerging technologies. And by revisiting these configurations on a regular cadence, we ensure we’re making decisions that provide the best user experience possible. 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.Īs our workloads grow and workflows evolve, each new generation of server hardware helps us stay ahead of Dropbox users’ needs. 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. For nearly a decade, Dropbox has run its own hardware infrastructure.
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