Cerabyte brings archival glass storage with 5,000 year durability to the U.S.

German archival glass storage specialist Cerabyte announced on July 15 that it is bringing its technology to the U.S. The firm has already opened offices in Santa Clara, Calif., and Boulder, Colorado to prepare to commercialize its ceramic glass tablet storage technology.

Cerabyte, founded in 2022 by Christian Pflaum, Martin Kunze, and Alexander Pflaum, hopes to revolutionize data storage by offering a system that keeps data safe from any loss without the need for a constant supply of electricity. It makes sense for the company to bring its business to the U.S. since the largest data storage providers and many of the largest potential consumers are located in the U.S.

At the heart of Cerabyte’s storage system, data is imprinted on a glass substrate tablet in the form of femtosecond laser nanoscale holes in a ceramic medium 50 to 100 atoms thick. This ceramic-on-glass material is cut into sheets 9cm square. The system can write data at a rate of 2 million bits per laser pulse and store up to 1GB of data on each of the tablet’s surfaces. 

Once recorded, the data is safely stored on a medium that Cerabyte says can last for 5,000 years or longer. It’s also resistant to loss from fire, water, radiation, EMP, and any other environmental effects known to cause data loss to formats such as tapes, hard drives, and SSDs. With currently available data archival methods, data retention is realistically only around 100 years, and media needs replaced or refurbished every 10 years or less.

Since the Cerabyte solution is much longer lasting, the company’s founders anticipate reducing media costs for the system to less than $1 per TB by 2030. They refer to it as being “durable as hieroglyphs.”

Cerabyte’s storage solutions allow organizations to store up to 100 PB in a single CeraMemory cartridge and up to an exabyte of data per CeraTape. The complete archival system stores the CeraMemory cartridges and CeraTape tapes in a set of library racks. Robotic arms retrieve the storage devices for reading and writing.

“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.”

According to Fred Moore, founder of Horison Information Strategies, data centers hope to get to a point where archived data that isn’t being used doesn’t consume energy. Right now, 60 to 80 percent of all data is in cold storage on devices that require energy to keep the data safe.

Cerabyte’s solution is currently available as a data storage system prototype. The company says it’s ready for commercialization, though, and has demonstrated end-to-end functionality in targeted environments.