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.
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Developing our strategy
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 of data we stored at the time was moved into data centers we managed ourselves—a turning point that enabled better performance, cost control, and scale. In the years following, we continued to grow—a lot. We ramped from 40PB of storage in 2012 to over 600PB by 2016. And today, we’re in our exabyte era, running on semi-custom hardware that we’ve designed to meet the unique needs of our platform. Along the way, we introduced new technologies such as SMR drives, which allow for higher storage density, and GPU accelerators for AI and compute-heavy tasks. And we’ve co-designed both hardware and software to serve our evolving workloads. So, before committing to any designs for our seventh-generation server hardware, we set some high-level goals that drew from both what we’d learned from previous generations and opportunities from the latest hardware advancements in the industry. Three primary themes shaped our approach: Embracing emerging tech
Infrastructure hardware is evolving fast. CPUs are getting more powerful with higher core counts and better performance per core. AI workloads are growing rapidly. Networks are moving toward faster speeds like 200G and 400G. And a new band of storage areal density has finally arrived. We used this moment to guide our strategy, aiming to harness these trends to improve our performance, efficiency, and scalability. Partnering with suppliers
For this generation, we partnered closely with suppliers to co-develop storage platforms that fit our needs. This gave us early access to technologies like higher-density drives and high-performance controllers—along with the opportunity to help tune firmware for our specific workloads. These partnerships enabled the optimizations we needed to tackle the acoustic, vibration, and thermal challenges that come with dense system designs. Strengthening these relationships also continues to give us a strategic edge: We get earlier access to emerging technology, deeper hardware customization, and a more stable platform. Designing with software in mind
We brought in our software teams early to find out what would actually move the needle for their services. That led to goals like packing more compute power into each rack, enabling GPU support for AI and video processing, and improving speed and responsiveness for our database systems. Co-designing was a central theme; we weren’t just designing servers, but building platforms that elevated our services. All of these goals converged around a central question: How big of a leap do we want to make, and what technologies will help get us there? Instead of maxing out everything just because we could, we focused on what matters most: better performance per watt, higher rack-level efficiency, and unlocking the right features to support our next chapter.
Dropbox seventh-generation hardware
A look under the hood of our next-gen hardware
Performance
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