But instead of running a victory lap, the Dropbox team went right back to work once Magic Pocket went live. Paperwork filed with the SEC prior to the company’s IPO in March of 2018 revealed that the move cut operating costs by $75 million.
It’s another to run the system for the long term.” (Dropbox still leverages AWS for its international storage needs.) According to the company, 90 percent of its user data had migrated from Amazon’s servers by October of 2015, two and a half years after the project began. In addition to the hardware hurdle, Dropbox software engineers had to create the server architecture and write code that controlled how data was written to the disks themselves.
Dropbox hardware engineers custom-built a box measuring 18 inches tall and 44 inches wide, dubbed “Diskotech,” that could store up to a petabyte’s worth of data. According to their reporting, the project required the construction of special machines capable of packing in as many hard disk drives as possible. Wired published a story in March of 2016 about what it took to bring Magic Pocket to life.
For the uninitiated, one exabyte is the equivalent of a billion gigabytes, or about 245 million DVDs’ worth of data. The team wanted to build a system from the ground up capable of storing exabytes of files. Efficiently storing metadata on hundreds of millions of files is a big challenge, but it pales in comparison to what Dropbox set out to do with Magic Pocket.Ĭan’t get enough hardware? Here’s the latest in 3D printing, quantum computing and wearables. If executed correctly, Dropbox would both slash its monthly AWS bill and be able to increase its data storage capacity through new technology.ĭropbox already had some experience building and scaling storage systems, having managed the metadata of users and files in-house since the company launched in 2007. The goal was deceptively simple: build a file storage system and end the company’s reliance on AWS. In the summer of 2013, a small team at Dropbox began work on a little project called “Magic Pocket.”
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