Micron’s 6550 ION 60TB SSD Advances High-Capacity Storage for HPC and AI Workloads 

BOISE, Idaho, Nov. 12, 2024 -- Micron Technology, Inc. today announced it has begun qualification of the 6550 ION NVMe SSD with customers. The Micron 6550 ION is the world’s fastest 60TB data center SSD and the industry’s first E3.S and PCIe Gen5 60TB SSD.

It follows the success of the award-winning 6500 ION and is engineered to provide best-in-class performance, energy efficiency, endurance, security, and rack density for exascale data center deployments. The 6550 ION excels in high-capacity NVMe workloads such as networked AI data lakes, ingest, data preparation and checkpointing, file and object storage, public cloud storage, analytic databases, and content delivery.

“The Micron 6550 ION achieves a remarkable 12GB/s while using just 20 watts of power, setting a new standard in data center performance and energy efficiency,” said Alvaro Toledo, vice president and general manager of Micron’s Data Center Storage Group. “Featuring a first-to-market 60TB 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 Gen5 60TB data center SSD and offers class-leading read and write bandwidth.1 The drive is also the world’s first 60TB SSD with OCP 2.5 support, introducing the 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 60TB SSDs, enabling the drive to achieve its published performance numbers using just 20 watts. Compared to competing 60TB 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 60TB SSDs, achieving:

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

Even with an impressive 61.44TB 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 60TB 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 61.44TB E3.S SSD, when compared to 122.88TB 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 60TB SSD endurance with 1.0 random drive writes per day (RDWPD) for 16KB random writes, providing up to 42% more endurance than competing 60TB 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.

The Micron 6550 ION is now available for sampling globally and is part of Micron’s industry-leading data center SSD portfolio. To learn more about the many other industry-leading features of the Micron 6550 ION SSD, visit: www.micron.com/6550ION.

About Micron

Micron is an industry leader in innovative memory and storage solutions transforming how the world uses information to enrich life for all. With a relentless focus on customers, technology leadership, and manufacturing and operational excellence, Micron delivers a rich portfolio of high-performance DRAM, NAND and NOR memory and storage products through our Micron and Crucial brands. Every day, the innovations that Micron's people create fuel the data economy, enabling advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and compute-intensive applications that unleash opportunities — from the data center to the intelligent edge and across the client and mobile user experience.

Source: Micron