Start-Up’s Profile: Cerabyte

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Here are more information given by Martin Kunze, founder and CMO:

The entire system eventually will consist of a writing unit (19" rack footprint) with the femtosecond-laser source that can feed multiple writing heads, (depending on miniaturization: 20 or more) with writing speed of GB/s each.

The data carrier itself is a square thin glass sheet (similar to Corning's Gorilla Glass) with a thin dark ceramic coating. The writing head uses a laser matrix of up to 2 million bits per shot, generated with the help of a digital micromirror device (DMD) with repetition rates of kHz, hence the high writing speed.

The glass sheets are stored in cartridges, which enable random access and short time to first byte of somes. Cartridges are kept in libraries in 19" rack footprint. Each library rack has at least one reading head (depending on the projected retrieval rate) with GB/s. A horizontal transport system delivers the written, full cartridges to the library racks. When a row of racks is fully written, die writing unit is moved to the next row and starts writing 24/7 again ...

The data capacity will be 10PB per rack with a roadmap to hundreds of PB/rack.

As you may understand it is not a consumer product. It is a storage solution for the vast amount of cold data in datacenters.
 
This is how it is projected.
 
The company is currently assembling the demo-system, which has of course not at all the above-described performance. However, our principle is to solely utilize (and partner with their supplier) materials and technologies, that are already widely used - to enable later fast scale up. Therefore, we only use components off the shelf for the demo system. The novelty is to combine them in some parts unconventionally. This allows us to build a demo system in shortest time to prove the concept is working.

Several components need adoptions to scale up performance, for that we are collecting funds in the A-round next year.

Example: for reading we use one of the fastest image sensors, which is - as it is standard today - a color sensor (RGGB) with a 16bit color-depth. For our purpose, we need a monochrome sensor with maximum 3bit greyscale. This would increase the resolution by 4x and speed up the image processing by 1 or 2 orders of magnitude and together increase the reading speed to the projected GB/s. Developing a monochrome sensor with low bit-depth is no rocket science and credibly arguable.
 
We created a handful of short videos for our website, that throw light on Cerabyte from different perspectives: TCO, reducing the digital age's carbon footprint, resilience, look inside, Cerabyte for archival data, Digital data as durable as hieroglyphs. A shortcut to the videos is here.
 
The idea to use ceramic as data carrier stems from a project I started about 10 years ago where images and text are printed with ceramic colors on high-quality bathroom tiles, stored deep in the oldest saltmine in Austria in order to pass on a snapshot of our era - and to point to the problem in the first place of how to preserve information at all on the long run. The MOM project was and still is widely covered in media and it helped me to find the respective experts and partners to eventually create a storage system that keeps data literally forever accessible, while also solving the problem of high costs (economically and ecologically) of storage.
 
In contrast to all other emerging technologies for long-term storage, Cerabyte origins from the purpose, while all others come from technology: some physicist, microbiologist, or chemist discovered a phenomenon or an effect and came up with the idea to use this for storage. We in contrary addressed the problem from the pain-side - utilizing a material with a track record of 5.000 years as data carrier ...