Cerabyte is expanding its operations to bring accessible, permanent storage technology to the US.
Cerabyte has announced its expansion into the United States, introducing its accessible permanent data storage technology. This innovative technology employs cost-efficient, flexible glass material, delivering rapid write/read speeds and substantial storage capacity. Headquartered in Germany, the company has established offices in Silicon Valley, California, and Boulder, Colorado.
Cerabyte’s solution allows data to be stored for virtually unlimited periods, significantly reducing the total cost of ownership for data center storage. Thanks to its media longevity and rapid access, Cerabyte addresses the challenges of long-term archival data storage, facilitating the implementation of fast-retrieval active archive solutions. This eliminates the need for periodic data migration from one media to another.
Fred Moore, founder of consulting firm Horison Information Strategies, lauded Cerabyte’s technology as a groundbreaking development in digital data storage. He highlighted how Cerabyte addresses the critical need for a removable, random access, air-gapped, energy-efficient mass storage solution, which is increasingly essential for data centers looking to reduce heavy energy consumption.
Addressing Cold Data Costs and Concerns
The exponential growth of data brings numerous challenges, including escalating costs, increased complexity in data management, potential security breaches, and difficulties in quickly accessing or analyzing data. The growing concern over CO2 footprint and sustainability further complicates these challenges.
Christian Pflaum, co-founder and CEO of Cerabyte, warned of an impending “data tsunami” and emphasized the necessity of new, innovative approaches to data storage to meet scalability and economic demands. He stated that Cerabyte aims to revolutionize data storage, addressing urgent cost and sustainability requirements of data centers. Pflaum outlined the company’s vision to achieve $1 per petabyte per month, representing a cost reduction of 1000x within the next two decades.
New Storage Tier Brings Advantages to Data Centers
In the future, most data will be stored in an active archive. Cerabyte’s technology will enable data centers to utilize high-performance data storage for computing and efficiently tier data on accessible, permanent, and sustainable ceramic-based storage. This will support exabyte-scale data center racks. Cerabyte’s persistent and immutable media technology can retain data for extended periods without periodic refreshes, migrations, or endurance checks.
Cerabyte is positioned to disrupt the archive storage market with low access latency. 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.
Cerabyte’s key features include:
- Semiconductor-like Scaling: Cerabyte’s technology roadmap leverages amortized semiconductor fabrication tools adapted for data storage use cases.
- Leveraging Existing Ecosystem: Cerabyte’s ceramic-on-glass sheets, stacked inside LTO tape-sized cartridges, utilize high-volume display glass, utilizing existing library automation.
- High-Performance Storage: Cerabyte encodes binary data that is readable by a scanning microscope. It uses femtosecond lasers to create millions of nanoscale holes in a ceramic layer with each pulse via a digital micromirror device (DMD).
The Cerabyte solution is currently available as a prototype and is ready for commercialization, having demonstrated end-to-end functionality in target environments.
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