Cerabyte Could Be Close To Replacing Tape Archives
Blocks&Files, Tuesday, January 23rd, 2024
Cerabyte requires venture capital funding, partnership with a tape library system vendor, or joint development with a large-scale user to bring its glass archival storage system to market.
The company is developing technology in which a femtosecond laser punches nanoscale holes in a ceramic layer to indicate a binary number which can be read by a scanning microscope. The data is organized into QR-code squares with 2 million bits written in one laser pulse and 1 GB of data on each surface of the glass. The ceramic-coated glass slab is held inside an LTO tape-sized cartridge holding around ten slabs and stored in a robotic library system. These write-once-read-many platters can hold data for a thousand years or more, with no need for periodic refreshes. A prototype system has been built using readily available technology components and the next step is getting a commercial product funded and built.