The move forms part of a series of updates affecting the Dropbox architecture. The company has started to move its workflow away from Amazon’s AWS cloud and to its own data centers, which provides greater control and access over files. This relies on a storage architecture termed Magic Pocket.
Dropbox is a useful service for the here and now, especially for collaborative working. However, most people move files to Dropbox for backup purposes and then rarely access them going forwards, unless they need to engage in disaster recovery. Running a system for this purpose alone is expensive for any business.
Dropbox holds a considerable volume of data. There are an estimated 500 million users and 200,000 business customers, with the size of the amassed data exceeding 500 petabytes. Holding all of this data in the same way may not be economic.
In recognizing the different levels of usage, TechCrunch reports that Dropbox is creating two levels of storage – warm and cold, which are analogous to being on different layers of the cloud. With the former, Magic Pocket is becoming the warm storage function for files in active use. A second service – the cold storage – will be used hold files less expensively, where files are kept for back-up purposes. The cold storage service is less expensive, and there will be some differences in terms of storage, performance and network bandwidth.
With the cold storage function, Dropbox are promising that files can still be delivered in a timely manner as and when required by the user. With the performance, Dropbox have said that the end-user experience is “almost indistinguishable between two tiers”.
This process is being undertaken using SMR technology. In developing this cold tier, this runs on the same hardware and network, but it saves costs by reducing the disk usage by 25 percent without compromising durability or availability.
The cold storage system will be assessed for durability and reliability, before it is rolled out to customers. If the process is successful, as judged by storage and retrieval efficiencies, Dropbox estimate that the change will reduce their operating costs by between 10 and 15 percent.
