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Big if true: After showing what its innovative storage solution can do over the past few years, Cerabyte is now ready to bring its technology to the United States. The German company believes it can solve the needs of power-hungry data centers with a “disruptive” data storage offering.
Cerabyte just announced the launch of its US-based operations from its newly established offices in Silicon Valley, California, and Boulder, Colorado. Founded by Christian Pflaum in 2022, the company developed a new storage technology that can seemingly retain massive amounts of data indefinitely. Modern data centers and storage operators are Cerabyte’s primary targets, as its technology can theoretically reduce the total cost of ownership by several orders of magnitude.
Cerabyte’s storage solution writes digital data on ceramic nanolayers 50-100 atoms thick, using fast lasers to etch QR code-like matrices. Ceramics are inorganic materials that can resist heat and corrosion that have existed for at least 26,000 years. Cerabyte now bets that its ceramic-based storage products can withstand the test of time and preserve data for at least 5,000 years or longer.
Once the data is recorded, the corresponding medium is safely stored, requiring zero energy to persist over time. Cerabyte highlights how 60 to 80 percent of all modern data is archived in “cold storage” devices on energy-inefficient HDDs. By 2025, the company estimates that archival/cold storage will amount to 4.5 to 6 zettabytes (one billion terabytes).
Cerabyte claims it can provide the first storage solution specifically designed to address modern data centers’ energy and volume requirements with minimal expense in the long term. Pflaum says his company aims to reduce costs 1000-fold over the next 20 years, eventually reaching $1 per petabyte per month.
Tom’s Hardware notes that a complete Cerabyte archival system consists of several CeraMemory cartridges and CeraTape units mounted in library racks, with robotic arms managing medium retrieval for reading and writing tasks. The German corporation is currently preparing two types of ceramic storage media–a single CeraMemory cartridge that stores up to 100 petabytes of data and a CeraTape that holds one exabyte.
Cerabyte’s tech is currently available as a data storage prototype but is entering the commercialization phase. The company showed in controlled environments that the system could work “end-to-end.” It hopes to entice big names in the US tech business to turn its promises into a real game-changing solution.
Source : TechSpot