Micron Launches 6550 ION 60TB PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSD Series

Micron Technology has just raised the bar for data centre storage with the launch of its 6550 ION NVMe SSD series. Boasting a massive 60TB capacity and leveraging the blistering speeds of PCIe Gen5 technology, the 6550 ION is poised to redefine performance and efficiency for data-intensive workloads. This industry-first E3.S form factor SSD delivers unparalleled read and write bandwidth, making it ideal for demanding applications like AI training, high-performance computing, and massive databases.

“The Micron 6550 ION achieves a remarkable 12 GB/s while using just 20 watts of power, setting a new standard in data centre performance and energy efficiency,” said Alvaro Toledo, vice president and general manager of Micron’s Data Center Storage Group. “Featuring a first-to-market 60 TB capacity in an E3.S form factor and up to 20% better energy efficiency than competitive drives, the Micron 6550 ION is a game-changer for high-capacity storage solutions to address the insatiable capacity and power demands of AI workloads.”

Delivers unmatched performance and energy efficiency

The Micron 6550 ION is the industry’s first PCIe Gen 5 60 TB data center SSD and offers class-leading read and write bandwidth. The drive is also the world’s first 60 TB SSD with OCP 2.5 support, introducing active state power management (ASPM). This new feature allows the drive to idle at 4 watts in the L1 state versus 5 watts in the L0 state, improving energy efficiency up to 20% when idling. Additional power benefits come from the drive’s industry-leading and energy-efficient G8 NAND, which is one to three NAND generations ahead of competing 60 TB SSDs, enabling the drive to achieve its published performance numbers using just 20 watts.

Compared to competing 60 TB drives, it delivers up to:

• 179% faster sequential reads and 179% higher read bandwidth per watt
• 150% faster sequential writes and 213% higher write bandwidth per watt
• 80% faster random reads and 99% higher read IOPS per watt

The 6550 ION also excels in critical AI training workloads compared to competitive 60 TB SSDs, achieving:

• 147% higher performance for NVIDIA Magnum IO GPUDirect Storage (GDS) and 104% better energy efficiency
• 30% higher 4 KB transfer performance for deep learning IO Unet3D testing and 20% better energy efficiency
• 151% improvement in completion times for AI model check pointing while competitors consume 209% more energy

Even with an impressive 61.44 TB capacity, the drive can be fully written in just 3.4 hours, while competing drives take up to 150% longer to fill. This allows for faster drive rebuilds and AI training set preparation – improving deployment times, increasing GPU utilization, and enhancing storage resiliency in high capacity NVMe SSDs.

Reduces footprint driving data center efficiency

The Micron 6550 ION is available in E3.S, U.2, and E1.L form factors. As the world’s first E3.S 60 TB SSD, the 6550 offers best-in-class density, reducing rack storage needs by up to 67%. It provides industry-leading space efficiency to store over 1.2 petabytes per rack unit (U). Using a 1U high-density server, such as the HPE ProLiant DL360 Gen11 that can accommodate 20 E3.S drives per rack unit, operators can load servers in a single rack with 44.2 petabytes. This solution is 67% denser than 2U servers that often house a maximum of 24 U.2 drives, yielding only 26.5 petabytes per rack. The 6550 61.44 TB E3.S SSD, when compared to 122.88 TB U.2 drives, delivers up to 3.3x the performance per terabyte. This improvement allows for significant server consolidation to optimize data center space and efficiency.

Increases drive endurance and bolsters security

The drive delivers best-in-class 60 TB SSD endurance with 1.0 random drive writes per day (RDWPD) for 16 KB random writes, providing up to 42% more endurance than competing 60 TB SSDs. Additionally, the 6550 ION offers an industry-leading security feature set, including SPDM 1.2 for attestation and SHA-512 for secure signature generation. It is TAA-compliant and FIPS 140-3 L2 certifiable delivering government required levels of security. The Micron 6550 ION is manufactured at multiple sites for supply chain resilience and is built with a vertically integrated architecture, including Micron DRAM, NAND, controller, and firmware.

Industry quotes

“The introduction of the Micron 6550 ION SSD is a groundbreaking advancement for data-intensive and emerging AI applications. Such innovations in storage technologies enable dense and energy-efficient solutions that evolve our customer’s infrastructure capabilities,” said Raghu Nambiar, corporate vice president, Data Center Ecosystems and Solutions at AMD. “We are excited to collaborate with Micron in enabling the ecosystem with the latest 5th Gen AMD EPYC processor-based platforms.”

“The VAST Data Platform is a unified data platform that seamlessly combines storage, databases, and compute into a single software solution, empowering customers with the capabilities needed to drive their transition to advanced computing and AI,” said Tomer Hagay, head of product at VAST Data. “By incorporating VAST’s data platform software with the Micron 6550 ION SSD, customers can achieve high capacity, high performance, and energy efficiency to meet the rigorous demands of modern AI workloads.”

“WEKA customers are achieving excellent results from their WEKA Data Platform and Micron 6500 ION deployments today. We expect the new Micron 6550 ION SSD will extend this value with enhanced performance density and energy efficiency benefits for enterprise AI environments,” said Nilesh Patel, chief product officer at WEKA. “With its impressive 61.44 TB capacity, the Micron 6550 ION will enable our mutual customers to implement rack-dense AI infrastructure solutions without sacrificing performance.”

The Micron 6550 ION is now available for sampling globally and is part of Micron’s industry-leading data center SSD portfolio.