Micron Technology, Inc. today announced that it has begun qualifying the 6550 ION NVMe™ SSD with customers. The Micron 6550 ION SSD is the world’s fastest 60TB data center SSD and the industry’s first 60TB SSD with E3.S and PCIe 5.0.1 This product builds on the success of the award-winning 6500 ION SSD, delivering industry-leading performance, energy efficiency, durability, security, and rack density for hyperscale data centers. The 6550 ION SSD excels at handling high-capacity NVMe workloads such as networked AI data lakes, data ingestion, data preparation and inspection, file and object storage, public cloud storage, as well as analytical databases and content distribution.
"The Micron 6550 ION SSD sets a new benchmark for data center performance and energy efficiency by delivering 12GB/s at just 20 watts of power," said Alvaro Toledo, vice president and general manager of Micron's Data Center Storage business unit. "As the first 60TB SSD in the E3.S form factor, the Micron 6550 ION SSD is up to 20 percent more energy efficient than competing products to meet the high capacity and low power requirements of AI workloads."
Delivering Superior Performance and Energy Efficiency The Micron 6550 ION is the industry's first PCIe 5.0 60TB data center SSD, with read and write bandwidths superior to competing products. [1] The product is also the industry’s first 60TB SSD to support OCP 2.5, and thanks to Active State Power Management (ASPM), the drive consumes only 4 watts in L1 idle mode, compared to 5 watts in L0 mode, for a 20% improvement in idle efficiency. Micron’s G8 NAND technology in the 6550 ION provides additional power savings, and is one to three generations ahead of other 60TB SSD NAND technologies on the market, [2] requiring only 20 watts to achieve its stated performance. Compared to competing 60TB SSDs, the Micron 6550 ION SSD leads with:
179% faster sequential reads and 179% higher read bandwidth per watt[3]
150% faster sequential writes and 213% higher read bandwidth per watt3
80% faster random reads and 99% higher read IOPS per watt3
The 6550 ION SSD offers significant advantages over other 60TB SSDs for key AI training workloads:
147% faster NVIDIA® Magnum IO™ GPUDirect® Storage (GDS) performance and 104% better energy efficiency[4]
30% faster 4KB transfer performance and 20% better energy efficiency for the Deep Learning IO Unet3D test[5]
151% faster AI model checkpoint completion time, compared to 209% lower energy consumption for competing products[6]
Despite its 61.44TB capacity, Micron The 6550 ION SSD can still be fully written in 3.4 hours, up to 150 percent faster than competing products. [7] This enables faster drive rebuilds and AI training set preparation, which in turn reduces deployment time, improves GPU utilization, and enhances storage resilience of large-capacity NVMe SSDs.
Reduce size and improve data center efficiency
Available in three form factors: U.2, E1.S, and E3.S, the Micron 6550 ION SSD offers market-leading density as the world’s first E3.S 60TB SSD, reducing rack storage requirements by up to 67 percent. [8] With industry-leading space efficiency, the product can store more than 1.2 PB of data per rack unit (U) [9]. Using a 1U high-density server equipped with 20 E3.S SSDs, operators can achieve a total storage capacity of 44.2PB in a single rack. [10] A typical 2U server on the market can accommodate up to 24 U.2 SSDs, providing only 26.5PB of storage capacity per rack, while Micron's solution increases density by 67%. In addition, the Micron 6550 61.44TB E3.S SSD delivers up to 3.3 times the performance per TB compared to a 122.88TB U.2 SSD,[11] enabling servers to be reduced in size and significantly consolidated, thereby optimizing data center space and efficiency.
Improved drive durability and security
The Micron 6550 ION SSD offers industry-leading durability in a 60TB SSD, with a random write of 16KB at 1.0 random drive write per day (RDWPD), which is 42% higher than similar 60TB SSDs on the market. 1 In addition, the Micron 6550 ION SSD features an industry-leading combination of security features, including SPDM 1.2 authentication and SHA-512. The Micron 6550 ION SSD is produced simultaneously at multiple manufacturing sites to ensure supply chain resilience and uses a vertically integrated architecture that combines Micron's own DRAM, NAND, controllers and firmware.
Industry Quotes:
Raghu Nambiar, corporate vice president of Data Center Ecosystem and Solutions at AMD, said: “The introduction of the Micron 6550 ION SSD marks a breakthrough in data-intensive and emerging AI applications. This innovation in storage technology provides us with a higher density and energy-efficient solution to help customers enhance their infrastructure. AMD is very excited to work with Micron to advance the ecosystem with the latest 5th Gen AMD EPYC processor platform.”
Tomer Hagay, head of product at VAST Data, said: “As a unified data platform, VAST Data Platform integrates storage, database and compute capabilities in a single software solution to provide customers with the capabilities they need to drive advanced computing and AI transformation. The combination of VAST Data Platform software and Micron 6550 ION SSD will provide customers with the high capacity, performance and energy efficiency to meet the demanding requirements of modern AI workloads.”
Weka’s chief product officer Nilesh Patel said: “WEKA customers can use the existing WEKA Data Platform and Micron 6500 ION SSD to achieve the same performance and energy efficiency as the existing WEKA Data Platform.” "We expect the new Micron 6550 ION SSD to deliver even more value to enterprises in AI environments with its higher performance density and energy efficiency. With a capacity of 61.44TB, the Micron 6550 ION SSD will enable our customers to deploy high-rack density AI infrastructure solutions without compromising performance."
The Micron 6550 ION SSD is sampling now worldwide and is part of Micron's industry-leading data center SSD storage portfolio.
[1] Compared to competing products, the Micron 6550 ION SSD has a capacity of up to 61.44TB. Comparison is based on publicly available competitive information at the time of the 6550 ION SSD release. The maximum power consumption of the Micron 6550 ION SSD and a competitive SSD is 20 watts, while the maximum power consumption of other competitive SSDs is 25 watts. Therefore, it can be concluded that the maximum power consumption of the 6550 ION SSD is 20% lower than that of the competitive products.
[2] Competitive information obtained from publicly available channels at the time of release. As stated in footnote 1, the 61.44TB SSD involved in the comparison is based on the industry's seventh generation or earlier NAND flash memory technology.
[3] Based on publicly available information at the time of this press release, sequential read and write performance is measured based on 128KB transfer size and 128 queue depth, competitive read and write bandwidth per watt is calculated based on sequential bandwidth rating at the published maximum power consumption value, and random read and write performance is based on 4KB transfer size.
[4] Tested by Micron engineering team, Micron 6550 ION SSD power consumption capped at 20W, competitive product power consumption capped at 25W, measured performance improvement of 147% using 4KB transfer size and 256 GDSIO. Energy efficiency based on measured performance and SSD power consumption data.
[5] Tested by Micron engineering team, Micron 6550 ION SSD power consumption capped at 20W, Solidigm D5-P5336 power consumption capped at 25W. Tested based on Unet3D benchmark, combined with three H100 simulation accelerators, measuring SSD performance and energy efficiency at 4KB transfer size, and recording corresponding SSD power consumption.
[6] Tested by Micron engineering team, Micron 6550 ION SSD power consumption capped at 20W and Solidigm D5-P5336 power consumption capped at 25W. DLIO checkpoint workload based on 8 GPU server simulated by Llama3 405B parameter LLM model, checkpoint data size is 415GB.
[7] Calculated based on 100% 128KB sequential write performance benchmark based on public information at the time of this press release.
[8] System comparison using 1U 20-slot SSD E3.S server vs. 2U 24-slot U.2 server. As of the time of this press release, no competitor has launched a 61.44TB capacity SSD in the E3.S form factor.
[9] Using Micron 61.44TB E3.S drives, with 20 SSDs per rack unit.
[10] Assuming 36 rack units are available for deploying server/storage systems, the storage capacity of the rack is calculated.
[11] Based on information from Anand Tech website, and assuming other 122.88TB SSDs have similar performance.