Dropbox Is Rolling Out a Private Network to Speed Up File Access (fortune.com)

Dropbox, the file storage company that last year moved 90 percent of its data out of Amazon Web Services cloud and into its own data centers, is at it again. From a report on Fortune: The San Francisco company is building its own international private network to make sure users abroad can access their files -- most of which reside in those aforementioned Dropbox U.S. data centers -- faster. "What people don't realize about the internet is that it is very 'bursty' and can hit bottlenecks," Akhil Gupta, vice president of engineering at Dropbox tells Fortune. That is why the company is ripping out third-party load balancers and replacing them with its own software running on standard Linux hardware. Insulating itself from the balky internet is also the reason Dropbox is contracting to use its own dedicated fiber cable to carry that traffic. "We want to make user experience as real time as possible since 70 percent of our users are outside the U.S. and most of the data lives in North America," says Dan Williams, Dropbox's head of production engineering. Dropbox still partners with Amazon for customers in some countries, like Germany, which require user data to stay in the country of origin.

Comments

Wow, 70 percent outside the U.S.???

[SuperKendall]

It seems kind of amazing that so many people outside the U.S. use DropBox. I mean I really like it, but you'd think most companies would want to keep data outside the U.S. if possible (which as noted they do do for German clients).

I guess it's just that there's nothing that works nearly so well anywhere else, which I could see being compelling even if your data was more likely to be snooped on.