Magic Pocket, Dropbox's multi-exabyte file storage system, spans 10s of thousands of storage servers containing nearly a million total disks. Optimizing the storage of file data to use these resources as efficiently as possible is of key to Dropbox's infrastructure strategy.

So in 2015, Dropbox started a project codenamed "Diskotech", which radically reexamined the profile of storage servers, leading to a new design that customized the software and hardware to match each other perfectly. Dropbox decided to use a new systems programming language, called Rust, to build this next-generation software--rather than go, the language the rest of the system was written in.

This talk will walk through an overview of the though process behind this project, contrast the new design against the old, and detail Rust's role as a pivotal part of the implementation.