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.

As our workloads grow and workflows evolve, each new generation of server hardware helps us stay ahead of Dropbox users’ needs. And by revisiting these configurations on a regular cadence, we ensure we’re making decisions that provide the best user experience possible. Often, that means making innovative bets on new and emerging technologies. 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.

But first, let’s take a closer look at what’s running in our data centers today.

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