Dropbox Magic Pocket Achieves Exabyte Scale with Western Digital High-Density Hard Disk Drives

Background

Dropbox needed to define and build a cost-effective, proprietary hybrid cloud model dependable enough to fulfill Dropbox's value of being worthy of their customer's trust and capable of keeping up with data growth.

Solution

Dropbox developed Magic Pocket, a multi-regional, exabyte-scale proprietary cloud capable of handling Dropbox's massive growth in business and personal solutions, utilizing Western Digital Ultrastar® Data Center HC690 hard drives to deliver more space-efficient and cost-effective storage capacity.

Key Results

• Delivered increased cost efficiency
• >99.999999999% annual data durability and 99.99% data availability
• First wide-scale deployment of a cloud with UltraSMR HDDs
• Increased reliability enabled by Western Digital's innovative technologies with the capacity to handle exponential data growth

Who Is Dropbox?

Dropbox is a global collaboration platform founded in 2007 with the simple premise that anyone should be able to access, edit, collaborate, and share their files at any time and from anywhere. To appreciate how visionary this was, recall that files, images, and videos were typically shared on USB sticks and the term 'cloud' was not part of our common vernacular.

Dropbox's success in creating a smart workspace that synchronizes files to the cloud has turned into over 700 million registered users across more than 180 countries.

Defining Magic Pocket

To deliver on this promise of trust and to accommodate their explosive growth, Dropbox needed to define and build its own file storage infrastructure. Magic Pocket is Dropbox's solution for an exabyte-scale proprietary cloud to accommodate and personalize their products while driving efficiency and performance.

Magic Pocket is an immutable, content-addressable, block storage system. When a user uploads a file to Dropbox, the file is split into 4MB (maximum) immutable blocks. Immutable means that these blocks never change. This allows blocks to be moved around to increase efficiency and ensure reliability through redundancy. The system is content-addressable with the index/name of each block being a hash of the content of each block. A file system sits on top of this data to provide the interface to millions of users.

High-Density HDDs Enable Magic Pocket

With data rates continuing to rise, the cost of infrastructure storage can be one of the largest expenses. Dropbox is always striving to pack more data into a fixed number of disks while keeping all their data accessible with low latency. Even if a user wants to see an image stored several years ago, they want to access that image immediately.

Dropbox has always relied on Western Digital to provide the highest-density hard drives to enable a leading-edge storage solution for Magic Pocket. Higher-density HDDs mean that more data can be put into the fixed area of a server chassis, requiring fewer racks. Fewer racks saves on CPU, RAM, housing, and floor space and provides other benefits that all contribute to a better cost structure and lower total cost of ownership. Because all data needs to be accessible all of the time, HDD disks are always spinning. Higher data density requires fewer mechanical disks which ultimately helps with reliability.

Leveraging Field-Proven Designs

Ultrastar Data Center HC690 hard drives are based on the world's first 11-disk hard drive platform and deliver SMR capacity of up to 32TB to help Dropbox's quest for increased storage density in the existing storage footprint. Western Digital created the HC690 by leveraging field-proven hardware and firmware designs from generations of highly successful products and combining them with the latest innovative technologies. This unique combination ensures easy qualification, seamless integration and rapid adoption while maintaining superior dependability, and reliability.

The higher storage density provided by 11 disks combined with Western Digital's exclusive energy-assisted perpendicular magnetic recording (ePMR) technology, which increase tracks per inch (TPI), allows Dropbox to maximize their storage efficiency.

The Future Is Magic Pocket

Dropbox defined, built, tested, and optimized Magic Pocket, an exabyte-scale, proprietary hybrid cloud. They were the first company to deploy SMR HDDs at scale in a data center environment and partnered with Western Digital to be one of the first to qualify and deploy Ultrastar Data Center HC690 hard drives.

Dropbox continues to expand their operations to keep up customer growth and expand their storage capabilities. Dropbox leverages UltraSMR architecture to more efficiently service tiers that are optimized for less-frequently accessed data.

Western Digital's technology helps Dropbox fulfill their mission of customer trust, while increasing data density, delivering better cost structure, and offering new opportunities.

Trusted Reliability, Quality, and World-Class Support

As an industry-leading hard drive manufacturer, Western Digital stands behind their Ultrastar hard drives with the assurance of a five-year limited warranty² and world-class support services to help create environments for data to thrive.

"Western Digital and Dropbox have long been pioneers of data storage, collaborating across multiple generations of Ultrastar HDD innovation,” said Ali Dasdan, Chief Technology Officer, Dropbox. "With the rise of AI and the multitude of data-rich content, the need for storage is ever-more critical as data creation accelerates. We look forward to continuing to deploy higher-capacity hard drives with Western Digital to continue to provide our customers increased value."

Get Started

For more information on how Western Digital Ultrastar Data Center HC690 hard drives can enhance your data storage infrastructure and improve your business operations, please visit www.westerndigital.com/solutions/data-center.

Visual Descriptions

Image 1: A Western Digital Ultrastar DC HC690 32TB data center SMR drive with OptiNAND™ technology.

Image 2: Rows of densely packed server racks in a data center environment.