Dropbox announces new gen server hardware for higher efficiency and scalability (dropbox.tech)

It would be sick if they could leverage this increased efficiency to reduce how frequently they bother already paying customers with annoying upsells

> a new band of storage areal density has finally arrived

Surely 'density' is a measure of stuff per area? Does 'areal density' have an additional meaning?

Dropbox Storage is a MUCH easier problem to solve than S3. They don't have the mix of high perf vs cold backup storage, so design is much, much simpler.

Out of curiosity, do people here still use Dropbox? I've had an account for over a decade, but haven't used it since ~2014; Google Drive and Syncthing have largely replaced it for me.

I always thought dual socket systems would be good for storage and vps based systems, but here we see that inter socket latency was hampering them. Good read!

Recently moved all my stuff from iCloud to DB - worth every penny.

How is Dropbox doing by the way? Are they in good shape?

They seem to be "out of headlines" for some time, which of course is not necessarily a bad thing...

I'm surprised Dropbox is not just 'own data centre' but 'teams designing custom hardware for our own data centre' scale tbh? Although I also would not have guessed that (even after laying off ~500 in each of 2023 and '24) it had a headcount of about 2100.

I have a few qualms with this server hardware

1. You can already build such a system yourself quite trivially

2. It doesn't actually replace a USB drive

3. It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating

Doubling the PDUs seems shockingly wasteful as apposed to just reducing equipment per rack slightly, there's no way you can consistently cool 30KW/rack with air (well, OK, you could but it's much more inefficient or would require RDHX). Best case you're looking at about 20KW, so they've doubled the power infra to deliver up to 30% more power?

Lower rack densities are also more efficient overall (down to about 6KW/Rack where they start getting more in-efficient again) as you're able to move air more slowly over the severs, it's much better for example to have two racks of 20X2U 500W servers than one rack of 40X1U 500W servers, as you can use bigger fans in the servers which are more efficient, and handle air in the room more easily.

I'm wondering how Oxide Computer racks can look so clean (for example in this picture: https://bsky.app/profile/oxide.computer/post/3lvdw7mdwms2i) compared to Dropbox's racks, and if there is a technical advantage beyond the aesthetic advantage.