Firm that kills hard disk drives with expensive SSDs invests in startup that wants to replace tape with ceramic slabs — Pure Storage invests in Cerabyte in a bid to become the Nvidia of Enterprise Storage

Cerabyte platter
(Image credit: Cerabyte)

To help turn its plans into reality and edge it closer to the dream of 10,000TB capacity cartridges, Cerabyte has secured a strategic investment from Pure Storage, which itself is developing large capacity storage, with its eye on 1,200TB SSD modules.

Cerabyte aims to create a new tier of accessible, permanent, and sustainable data storage, extending from petabyte to exabyte-scale data center racks. This persistent media technology can retain data for extremely long periods without consuming power.

Cerabyte’s ceramic-based data storage does not suffer from bit rot or silent corruption, which threatens data integrity over time. Instead, it provides an immutable record of the original data required in an increasing number of use cases, especially in the era of AI.

Towards the Yottabyte Era

“Pure’s investment in Cerabyte and our joint partnership will allow us to offer customers sustainable and immutable data storage solutions that are revolutionizing the industry,” said John (Coz) Colgrove, Founder and Chief Visionary Officer of Pure Storage. “By disrupting the archival storage market, we are paving the way for longer-lasting and easier-to-manage long-term storage.”

We’ve written about Cerabyte previously. The startup is working to solve the problem of data storage by taking a leaf out of the ancient Egyptians' practice of chiseling hieroglyphs into rock. Its much more modern solution involves using a femtosecond laser pulse to inscribe data in QR code-like patterns onto ceramic, a material that can survive for over 5000 years.

Christian Pflaum, CEO of Cerabyte, said, “As the industry is heading towards the Yottabyte Era, sustainable data storage, which eliminates the need for data migration and thereby scales down the energy footprint and TCO, will be critical to harness the data tsunami ahead. We are thrilled to partner with Pure Storage to commercialize ceramic data storage and welcome John to our Board of Directors.”

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Wayne Williams
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Wayne Williams is a freelancer writing news for TechRadar Pro. He has been writing about computers, technology, and the web for 30 years. In that time he wrote for most of the UK’s PC magazines, and launched, edited and published a number of them too.