Many doubted what jamwt claimed is physically possible, but doing the math reveals that Dropbox is basically packing 793TB in 4U if we naively scale linearly (of coz it's not that simple in practice). Basically Diskotech stores 1PB in 18" × 6" × 42" = 4,536 cubic inch volume, which is 10% bigger than standard 7U (17" × 12.2" × 19.8" = 4,107 cubic inch).ġ24 days ago Dropbox Storage Engineer jamwt posted here ( ) stating that Dropbox is "packing up to an order of magnitude more storage into 4U" compared to Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0, which is 180TB in 4U (assuming it's the deeper 4U at 19" × 7" × 26.4" = 3,511 cubic inch). > Measuring only one-and-half-feet by three-and-half-feet by six inches, each Diskotech box holds as much as a petabyte of data What really has happened after looking at all the recruiter spam and some of the interviews I've taken on a lark is that the term has become another way of marketing to engineers with modernized skillsets when they can't retain good ones for more than maybe two months (during which time the engineer is interviewing for another role almost certainly) because good engineers tend to run away from these companies for many legitimately founded reasons. My current role was sold to me as a "devops" role with the usual jargon of automation - I can't think of how this role has actually prepared me to pass a serious interview as an SRE at Google, Dropbox, Yahoo, or other tech companies.
With devops, there's a massive difference between how big companies (old, archaic companies by tech company standards) perceive of it compared to how smaller companies do. One thing I'll grant Agile is that there's a great deal more standardized technical topics and standards meaning expectations when using the term. And managing more than half a million disks without an incredible SRE team is basically impossible. In particular, the contributions of the SREs didn't make it into the article. The full picture is James and I were very fortunate to work with a team of more than a dozen amazing engineers on this project, that lead designs and implementations of key parts of it, and that stayed just as late at the office as we did during crunch time. Especially given very generous phrasing at times like "Turner rebuilt Magic Pocket in an entirely different programming language".
In particular, on the software team, James and I are highlighted here, and it would be easy to assume we did this whole thing ourselves. There is a necessary abridgement that happens in media like this, wherein a few individuals in lead roles act as a vignette for the entire effort. And this community of hackers and entrepreneurs seems as good a place as any to clear the air. I want to point out one other thing about this project, if only to assuage my guilt.
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