Dropbox Unveils Infrastructure Updates

Dropbox has expanded its global footprint with new Points of Presence (PoPs) across Europe, Asia, and parts of the U.S., while working to establish faster connections for clients through an open-peering policy.

"We’ve established proxy servers at the network edge, giving us accelerators in California, Texas, Virginia, New York, Washington, the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, Japan, Singapore and Hong Kong," Dropbox VP of engineering and infrastructure Akhil Gupta said in a blog post on Wednesday.

According to the post, the open-peering policy is offered free of charge to provide faster connections and improved network performance. With open-peering, ISPs and telcos can route Dropbox traffic directly to and through Dropbox’s networks. This reduces bandwidth costs while improving transfer speeds for users, Dropbox says.

Also as part of the announcements, Dropbox said that it is storing over 90 percent of its customers’ data on its custom-built architecture, called Magic Pocket.

“We plan to continue this expansion in new regions over the next six to twelve months, and will continue to make infrastructure investments as the needs of our customers evolve and change,” Dropbox says. “This expansion we’re announcing today is another part of that ongoing investment in our infrastructure, as we strive to offer the best possible experience for all of our users.”

In an effort to minimize the average Round Trip Time (RTT) per HTTPS request to its data centers, Dropbox has connected its PoP to its data centers via private Backbone links, helping it “avoid the latency cost of opening a new connection when you want your data synced and start the transfer immediately.”