Ceramics as an extremely durable material for new data storage
The German Startup Cerabyte has developed the prototype of a long-term data storage on ceramic layers. This is also of interest to investors from Silicon Valley: Accordingly, Cerabyte has announced its expansion into the United States (with offices in Silicon Valley, California, and Boulder, Colorado). The technology uses cost-effective flexible glass material with its revolutionary, easily accessible, permanent data storage technology and offers fast writing/reading with high storage capacity.
Paving the way for the Yottabyte era
Ceramic nanomemory is capable of meeting data center requirements for density, performance and access, as well as cost and sustainability, and offers a scalable path to the yottabyte era.
Cerabyte was founded by a handful of pioneers who dared to rethink sustainable data storage from the ground up. Our vision is to store all data forever and preserve today’s digital records for the future.
Yottabyte – largest unit of measurement in computer science
A yottabyte is a unit of information technology for storage capacity or data volume. The smallest electronic storage unit is a bit. It contains binary information – 0 or 1 – and therefore means “binary digit”. The currently largest digital storage unit is a yottabyte – also known as yotabyte, yobibyte, YByte or YB.
Size ratios between bits and yottabytes:
-
-
-
- 8 bits – eight binary pieces of information – are one byte.
- 1024 bytes are one kilobyte (KB, KBbyte).
- 1024 kilobytes are one megabyte (MB, Mbyte).
- 1024 megabytes are one gigabyte (GB, GByte).
- 1024 gigabytes are one terabyte (TB, TByte).
- 1024 terabytes are a petabyte (PB, PByte).
- 1024 petabytes are one exabyte (EB, EByte).
- 1024 exabytes are one zettabyte (ZB, ZByte).
- 1024 Zettabytes sind ein Yottabyte (YB, YByte, Yobibyte).
-
-
For the sake of simplicity, manufacturers and specialist articles use a conversion in increments of 1,000, so that 1,000 bytes represent a kilobyte and 1,000 kilobytes represent a megabyte. For a yottabyte, this would result in a deviation of more than 20%:
– 1 YB = 1 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 bytes = 1024 bytes (rounded)
– 1 YB = 1 208 925 819 614 629 174 706 176 Bytes = 280 Bytes = 10248 Bytes
Commercially available hard drives in laptops and desktop computers are now in the terabyte range. The data volume per month for mobile phone contracts is often in the single-digit gigabyte range. In 2000, total Internet traffic was around 2.4 petabytes; in 2022, the monthly volume was estimated at 292 exabytes per month. Videos account for most Internet traffic (around 240 exabytes per month); in the USA, Netflix’s share of total Internet traffic is almost 25%. (https://t2informatik.de/wissen-kompakt/yottabyte/)
Cerabyte’s solution can store data virtually indefinitely, reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO) of data center storage by orders of magnitude. Due to the media’s durability and fast access, Cerabyte also solves the challenges of long-term data archiving by enabling the implementation of active archive solutions with rapid retrieval and eliminating the need to regularly migrate data from one media to another.
“Cerabyte’s emerging and groundbreaking technology is the most exciting development in digital data storage today,” said Fred Moore, founder of Horison Information Strategies. “Cerabyte is the answer to the long-standing challenge of bridging the gap in the storage hierarchy – the need for an energy-efficient, random-access, air-covered mass storage solution. Reducing high energy consumption is a key concern for most data centers.”
The exponential growth of data brings with it serious challenges such as escalating costs, increased complexity in data management, potential security breaches, and difficulties in quickly accessing or analyzing data. Carbon footprint and sustainability are also increasing concerns.
$1 per petabyte per month
“A data tsunami is coming – and new, groundbreaking approaches to data storage are needed to meet the emerging demands for scalability and economics. Cerabyte is ready to change the way data is stored and meet the urgent cost and sustainability requirements of data centers,” says Christian Pflaum, co-founder and CEO of Cerabyte. “Our vision is to achieve a 1000x cost reduction within the next two decades, namely $1 per petabyte per month.”
“A key goal of many data centers today is ‘if data isn’t being used, it shouldn’t be using energy.’ A staggering 60 to 80 percent of all data is archived/cold, and much of that is stored on energy-inefficient hard drives. By 2025, archived/cold data will amount to 4.5 to 6 zettabytes, making it the largest storage category. Cerabyte is poised to be the first storage solution to effectively meet all of these requirements,” adds Moore.
New storage class brings benefits for data centers
In the future, the vast majority of data will be stored in an active archive. With Cerabyte, data centers will be able to leverage high-performance data storage for data processing and efficiently layer data on accessible, durable and sustainable ceramic-based storage media, using ex-byte-scale data center racks. The persistent and immutable media technology can store data for extremely long periods of time without the need for regular updates, data migrations or fixity checks.
Due to its low access latency, Cerabyte is able to break archival storage. Physical bits are ablated into reusable ceramic-on-glass platters, allowing data to be stored virtually forever, even in extreme conditions, without consuming power and without the bits rotting.
- Semiconductor-like scaling: Cerabyte’s technology roadmap is based on the technology of amortized semiconductor manufacturing tools adapted for data storage applications.
- Leverage existing ecosystem: Display glass, produced in bulk, is used for Cerabyte’s ceramic-on-glass disks, which are stacked in LTO tape cartridges and leverage existing library automation.
- High-performance storage: The Cerabyte system encodes binary data that can be read with a scanning microscope, using femtosecond lasers to create millions of nanoscale holes in a ceramic layer with each pulse, using a DMD (digital micromirror device).
The Cerabyte solution is available as a prototype data storage system and is close to commercialization. It has proven its end-to-end functionality in target environments. Cerabyte was founded in 2022 by Christian Pflaum, Martin Kunze and Alexander Pflaum. The company participated in the Intel Ignite Accelerator program and has received $10 million in seed capital to date.
->Sources:
