Backups were needed on two occasions, when trucks bringing the SMR drives to the facility were involved in accidents. Getting everything done meant that the physical storage data center needed to be constructed on a tight schedule, with logistics carefully managed, including the supply of backup parts. In a sport that both men consider riskier than skydiving, BASE jumpers leap off a cliff or high point and free-fall or glide before opening their parachutes. Since Gupta and Cowling are both skydivers, they dubbed the project BaseJump. The Diskotech is a little longer than a standard rackmount server tray from front to back, but it takes up only 4U (7-inch) or pizza-box-server spaces in a rack.Īfter its design, Cowling said the team members aimed at getting what they would call their Deep Pocket system built and into production in six months. The goal was to concentrate as much storage as possible in a unit that consumed as little space and power as possible, Cowling said. The team also designed a compact unit of storage that could hold a petabyte of data, which was dubbed Diskotech. They switched to another modern language, Rust, which required less memory.
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The software controlling the storage system was first written in the Go language, which originated at Google, but the team found it too hungry for memory. Rather, it thrives on many sequential writes. Shingled magnetic recording "is not designed for high-performance random writes," he said. Given the nature of the technology, he had to research how best to design a system based on SMR for Dropbox, because its performance lags behind magnetic disks using regular or non-overlapping writes. "We're one of the first companies to be deploying SMR" as a core production storage system, said Cowling in an interview. The storage software would use RAM and additional forms of storage to offset SMR's drawbacks. The approach can increase disk density by 25%, although it also necessarily slows writes. SMR is a dense data recording technique in which one track on a hard drive is partially overwritten by the next, as shingles on a roof overlap. That meant a new storage software system, along with storage hardware based on shingled magnetic recording technology.
Cowling had been with the company for a year when he got the assignment to replace AWS's S3 with something that could operate at scale, but was geared to Dropbox's specific needs. One of the people called in to lead the task was James Cowling, who had gotten to know Dropbox cofounder Drew Houston when the two were in computer science at MIT. To begin the storage move, Dropbox in 2013 set up a small team to start architecting the move, build a prototype storage system, and find a way to scale it up to massive proportions, Gupta said. Business systems and a limited amount of customer storage still run there. It may have set up a massive storage system of its own, but "a lot of our infrastructure is still on Amazon and will continue to be for the foreseeable future," he said. Gupta also pointed out, however, that Dropbox as a company didn't move everything off Amazon. "We could see how it would be valuable to create our own storage system," Gupta said.
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