Cerabyte expands into US with ceramic-based technology for permanent data storage

Cerabyte today announced its expansion into the United States with accessible permanent data storage technology. The technology uses cost-efficient flexible glass material and offers fast write/read with high storage capacity. Cerabyte has established offices in Silicon Valley, California, and Boulder, Colorado.

Cerabyte's solution can store data for virtually unlimited time and reduce data center storage total cost of ownership (TCO) by orders of magnitude. Due to its media longevity and rapid access, Cerabyte also solves the challenges of long-term archival data storage, enabling the implementation of fast-retrieval active archive solutions and eliminating the need to periodically migrate data from one media to another.

“Cerabyte’s emerging and disruptive technology is currently the most exciting development in digital data storage,” said Fred Moore, founder of Horison Information Strategies. “Cerabyte addresses the long-standing challenge of filling ‘the hole in the storage hierarchy,’ the requirement for a removable, random access, air-gapped, energy efficient, mass storage solution. Reducing heavy energy consumption now sits squarely in the bull’s-eye for most data centers.”

The exponential growth of data poses serious challenges, including escalating costs, increased complexity in data management, potential security breaches, and difficulties in quickly accessing or analyzing data. CO2 footprint and sustainability are growing areas of concern.

“A data tsunami is on the horizon – and new, trail-blazing approaches to data storage are needed to meet the looming scalability and economic requirements. Cerabyte is prepared to transform how data is stored and address the urgent cost and sustainability demands of data centers,” said Christian Pflaum, co-founder and CEO of Cerabyte. “Our vision is to achieve $1 per petabyte per month, a cost reduction of 1000x within the next two decades.”

“A primary objective for many data centers today is that ‘if data isn’t used, it shouldn’t consume energy.’ A staggering 60 to 80 percent of all data is archival/cold, much of which is stored on energy-inefficient HDDs. By 2025, archival/cold data will amount to 4.5 to 6 zettabytes, making it the largest storage classification category. Cerabyte is poised to be the first storage solution to address all requirements effectively,” added Moore.

New Storage Tier Brings Advantages to Data Centers

In the future, the vast majority of data will be stored in an active archive. With Cerabyte, data centers will be able to utilize high-performance data storage for computing and tier data efficiently on accessible, permanent and sustainable ceramic-based storage, deploying exabyte-scale data center racks. The persistent and immutable media technology can hold data for extremely long periods without the need for periodic refreshes, data migrations, or fixity checks.

Due to its low access latency, Cerabyte is positioned to disrupt archive storage. Physical bits are ablated into recyclable ceramic-on-glass sheets, retaining data virtually forever with a zero-power footprint and without bit rot, even under extreme conditions.

• Semiconductor-like Scaling: Cerabyte’s technology roadmap builds on amortized semiconductor fabrication tool technology adapted for data storage use cases.

• Leverage Existing Ecosystem: Display glass, produced in high volumes, is used for Cerabyte’s ceramic-on-glass sheets, which are stacked inside LTO tape-sized cartridges leveraging existing library automation.

• High-Performance Storage: The Cerabyte system encodes binary data readable by a scanning microscope, employing femtosecond lasers to create with each pulse millions of nanoscale holes in a ceramic layer using a DMD (digital micromirror device).

The Cerabyte solution is available as a data storage system prototype and is primed for commercialization. It has demonstrated end-to-end functionality in target environments. Interested customers can experience Cerabyte’s prototype and technology here.

Cerabyte was founded in 2022 by Christian Pflaum, Martin Kunze and Alexander Pflaum. The company participated in the Intel Ignite accelerator program and has raised $10 million in seed funding to date.