Dropbox announces new gen server hardware for higher efficiency and scalability

Summary

Fourteen years ago, Dropbox took its first steps toward building its own hardware infrastructure—and as our product and user base has grown, so has our infrastructure. What started with just a handful of servers has evolved into one of the largest custom-built storage systems in the world. We've scaled from a few dozen machines to tens of thousands of servers with millions of drives. That evolution didn’t happen by accident. It took years of iteration, close collaboration with suppliers, and a product-first mindset that treated infrastructure as a strategic advantage. Now we’re excited to share what’s next: the launch of our seventh-generation hardware platform, now featuring Crush, Dexter, and Sonic for our traditional compute, database, and storage workloads, and our newest GPU tiers, Gumby and Godzilla. To make this leap possible, we dramatically increased storage bandwidth, effectively doubled our available rack power, and introduced a next-gen storage chassis designed to even further minimize vibration and heat. This generation represents our most efficient, capable, and scalable architecture yet—and it’ll help us as we continue to build and scale helpful AI products like Dropbox Dash. Below, we’ll walk you through how we designed the latest version of our server hardware as well as key lessons we’ll carry into generations to come. Dropbox Dash: Find anything. Protect everything. Find, organize, and protect your work with Dropbox Dash. Now with advanced search for video and images—plus generative AI capabilities across even more connected apps. See what's new → To understand how we got to where we are today, it’s helpful to understand how we built the infrastructure foundation on which Dropbox runs. Back in 2015, we relocated all US customer data from off-premises hosts to on-site ones. The Magic Pocket team executed a massive migration project, bringing the bulk of Dropbox’s file storage into our own custom-built infrastructure. Over 90% of the roughly 600PB o...