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.

Big in Canada

[mykepredko]

If I was to rank the data sharing tools the various people I work with, it would be:
- Dropbox
- GDrive
- WeTransfer

For code:
- GitHub (80%+)
- Dropbox (Remainder)

It's a good tool, not particularly fast but reliable and easy for neos to use.

Re:Big in Canada

[w1zz4]

Mmmm, I am canadian, working for a canadian company and sending file on dropbox is strictly prohibited. Using any US cloud service to share file is in fact prohibited. We always use a service hosted in Canada, probably even hosted in one of our datacenter, I'm quite surprise by your number, that may not include in house tools.

Re:Big in Canada

[tlhIngan]

Mmmm, I am canadian, working for a canadian company and sending file on dropbox is strictly prohibited. Using any US cloud service to share file is in fact prohibited. We always use a service hosted in Canada, probably even hosted in one of our datacenter, I'm quite surprise by your number, that may not include in house tools.

It depends on the application. We have dropbox internally, but it's used by sales to hold all the sales collateral. If that gets out, well, free marketing for us.

Customers often use GDrive to share files with us, while we host an internal FTP server to share stuff back. Internally we just have our own fileserver, so external cloud services are used for specific cases.

But I've seen companies ban the use of all cloud storage providers period, so it really depends on the company. Of course, the better of those companies detail the various ways you can use what the company already provides to do the same thing. If you need to transfer a large file, there's a few temporary file servers that will host your data internally and you send a link to it. If you need to send a file to a customer, there's ways for that as well. It's only the lousy companies that ban it and don't provide an equivalent method of sharing files that cause people to get creative.