Cerabyte increased its footprint in the U.S. with two new offices as it looks to go beyond the prototype stage for a potential commercialization in the coming years.
A new archive player has opened offices in the United States in its pursuit to bring permanent enterprise storage to market.
Headquartered in Munich, Germany, Cerabyte was founded in 2022 and uses ceramic nanolayers to write data onto glass for long-term data storage. Now it's expanding to the U.S. with new offices in Santa Clara, Calif., and Boulder, Colo., in a strategic move that puts it closer to archival tech and talent.
"[Cerabyte] uses laser technology … and most of that expertise is in Germany and Austria," said Fred Moore, founder and president of Horison Information Strategies, a consultancy in Boulder. "This technology will go into a library system, and the world's tape library engineering skills are all here in Boulder."
Brent Ellis, an analyst at Forrester Research, agreed, noting that the expansion suggests a seriousness about building an archive product for a U.S.-based market.
"[Expanding] gives them access to more technology to build out a commercial product," Ellis said.
Ceramic storage technology
Founded by Christina Pflaum, Martin Kunze and Alexander Pflaum, Cerabyte uses already available components and existing form factors to bring a new storage media to market. Cerabyte is an optical storage media, which uses lasers to read and write data. But instead of using a more traditional form factory like CDs, Cerabyte uses nanoscale ceramic on thin glass sheets.
Cerabyte then uses a digital micromirror device -- a chip with hundreds of thousands of microscopic mirrors -- to split its femtosecond laser -- an infrared laser with ultrashort pulses -- into 2 million bits. This enables a parallel write of 2 million bits per pulse etched into the glass, which comes out to roughly 1 GBps. These are written in quick response codes, which can be read by optical readers or microscopes and in parallel for faster speeds.
Two million bits or 200,000 bytes per pulse is fast for writes, Moore said. While Cerabyte also uses parallelism for reads, it is limited by library technology.
"The read times are going to be based on whatever the I/O channel back to the host is," Moore said.
Using ceramics and glass, which are made from sand, relies on a raw material that is widely available, according to the vendor. That could lower the cost of archival storage for users. Initially, however, costs will be higher than HDDs due to the product still being in the prototype phase with limited production. But when considering total cost of ownership, Cerabyte is projecting a cost 95% lower than HDDs and 75% lower than tape by 2030.
Cerabyte has a working prototype in a four-rack system. For storage, Cerabyte’s first system, which it plans to introduce next year, is projected to be 1 petabyte per rack, with read and write performance of 100 MBps and 90 seconds to first byte*. By 2030, the vendor is projecting an increase to 100 PB per rack for capacity, and a performance increase of over 2 GBps speeds while reducing the time to first byte to under 10 seconds.
Unlike archival products today, ceramic is highly durable as well as resistant to extreme temperatures; moisture; radiation; electromagnetic pulses; and bit rot, a slow degradation of data integrity over time. Cerabyte stated that the data can be stored for potentially thousands of years, that data can be removed by punching out the area where the data is stored, and that the media is recyclable.
But the average business doesn't need its data archived for centuries, according to Ellis. Instead, it needs a clear way for how to get rid of data when it can so it doesn't become a liability.
"Archive data is a risk if it's kept past the compliance and regulation period," he said.
The high durability of the ceramics could be an issue when the data is no longer needed, Ellis said. Those that work in data archive know how to dispose of HDDs and tapes. But ceramic storage is new, and Cerabyte will need to make it clear what to do with this media when destruction is warranted.
The largest market
Cerabyte is going after the market that nearline disk and tape address, Moore said. But both types of media have their disadvantages. Disks are not removable, must always be powered on and can't provide physical air-gapping for data protection. Tape offers physical air-gapping and is more energy efficient, but it doesn't have random access capabilities, so data is read sequentially rather than providing a direct point of access.
"[Cerabyte] does in one product what disk and tape both have to do for low-activity or inactive archival data," he said.
[Cerabyte] does in one product what disk and tape both have to do for low activity or inactive archival data.
Fred MoorePresident, Horison Information Strategies
This fills a gap in the archive hierarchy between HDDs and tape by providing hybrid capabilities of the two, such as random access and air gapping in one media, according to Moore. But he also sees the potential for a bigger market opportunity for Cerabyte.
"Today, 80% of the world's data sits on disks. But 60% of that data is inactive and should be stored elsewhere," he said.
If data is stored on spinning disks but never accessed, it's still using energy that could be saved by shifting to a more energy-efficient archive media. such as Cerabyte, Moore said.
Cerabyte's president Steffen Hellmold argued that its technology should be used in conjunction with magnetic tape.
"It is better together with adding a new tool to the storage toolbox rather than singing the replacement song," Hellmold said.
That strategy could change as Cerabyte ramps up production capabilities and its cost-to-performance numbers improve, Ellis said.
"There will be a point where, if the technology takes off and the cost per terabyte is less than that of tape, why would you have a tape library?" he asked.
*The original version of this story cited this data as belonging to Cerabyte's prototype.
Adam Armstrong is a TechTarget Editorial news writer covering file and block storage hardware and private clouds. He previously worked at StorageReview.
