Cerabyte, founded in 2022 in Munich, Germany and recently opened a Silicon Valley headquarters. It has raised $10M in seed funding to date, announced availability of protypes of its ceramic on glass storage system. I originally wrote about this technology in 2023.
Fred Moore of Horison LLC says that “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.”
This storage system is said to be a write once and fast retrieval active archive storage solution. An image of the recording media is shown below.
One of the advantages of this media is that, although it will have shock sensitivity it doesn’t not require special storage temperatures and humidity for longevity, unlike magnetic tape storage. Thus, this optical media may be capable of very long-term storage without the need for regular data migration to new media.
An ultra-short blue laser pulse reflected off a digital multi-mirror device (such as TI’s DLP micromirror projector technology) is used to create patterns of laser light that go through standard optics to ablate these patterns on the 10nm thick ceramic media layer. A white paper from Cerabyte says that it can write up to 2 million bits per pulse in parallel at high repetition-rates in the Khz range. They say they can increase this to more than 1GB/s with less than 1W average power. The demonstrated write and read process is shown in the images below.
This leaves regions with patterns looking something like QR codes on the resulting media with fine spots, whose size is defined by the wavelength of the laser used for the ablation—as shown below.
The images of this technology from the company show that they can do this record and readback on an optical test bench. The company says that the ceramic coated glass media will be accessed from LTO-tape-sized cartridges that hold several media and with the cartridges moved to readers using robotics, similar to current tape and optical storage library systems.
Cerabyte says that they will have semiconductor-like scaling using semiconductor fabrication tool technology adapted for data storage use cases. I think what this means is that they are using laser technologies like those used for semiconductor fabrication with smaller spot sizes over time. They also had an interesting progression beyond UV to using focused ion beam and other particle beam technologies such as focused ion beams and electron beams to create even finer spots and thus higher storage density.
Cerabyte projects rapid development of the technology for hyperscale and ever faster storage systems as shown below. They say that today it provides 90 seconds to first byte and they can storage 1PB in a rack with 100MB/s data rates, but by the end of the decade they say they can access the first byte in less than 10 seconds with 2+GB/s data rates in 100 PB racks.
These numbers may lead to higher density than magnetic tape systems, depending upon the rate of roll-out of magnetic tape technology—note that IBM announced 50TB native half inch tape cartridges in August 2023 and the next LTO generation should have 36TB native capacity.
Cerabyte says that their media will have lower media costs than HDDs or magnetic tape and require less frequent hardware replacement or data migration. They also say, because it doesn’t have any environmental requirements that it could save 75% of the total cost of ownership (TCO) compared to magnetic tape. They say temperatures of -272 C to 500 C will not damage the media and that it is corrosion resistant and radiation proof. I note that this seems to take in only the ceramic recording media and may not reflect any environmental requirements for the storage library system.
Optical storage technology development continues. Cerabyte is offering prototypes of its ceramic on glass optical storage system designed to support fast access to high density archival media libraries.
