Dropbox customers around the world will now be able take advantage of new private networking services through datacenter giant Equinix as well as new Dropbox networking sites in six new locations, the company plans to announce Wednesday.
Six new points-of-presence will allow large Dropbox customers in those areas to quickly tap into its private network and share files over a connection much faster than the public internet. Those new points-of-presence will come online in Atlanta, Denver, Berlin, and Toronto in the first half of this year, with Stockholm and Oslo expected to arrive in the second half of the year, Dropbox said in a press release.
The company will also allow users that don’t quite need that much horsepower to take advantage of private networking connections maintained by Equinix, which is one of the leading retail data center providers in the world. The Equinix Cloud Exchange Fabric connects more than 190 data centers in 24 countries, and provides another option for customers that would like the benefits of private networking but don’t have the skills or resources to peer directly with the Dropbox points-of-presence.
Many big cloud services offer private network connections for their customers. As applications have become more real-time in nature, any delays in latency across public internet connections can cause cascading problems down the line. Private networks allow cloud providers to guarantee some level of service while squeezing a little more margin out of their customers.
Dropbox plans to hold an event later on Wednesday to provide a closer look at its private infrastructure, as it gears up for an IPO in the coming weeks. The company grew its business on Amazon Web Services, but made the decision a few years ago to build out its own infrastructure after realizing it could optimize both hardware and software for its unique workloads.
That decision saved Dropbox $75 million over two years, and significantly cut its operating margins heading into its IPO.
