Fastest data centre SSD delivers unrivalled workload performance for AI and beyond

Micron Technology, Inc. has announced the availability of the Micron 9550 NVMe SSD – the world's fastest data centre SSD and industry leader in AI workload performance and power efficiency. The SSD showcases the company's deep expertise and innovation by integrating its own controller, NAND, DRAM and firmware into one world-class product. This integrated solution facilitates class-leading performance, power efficiency and security features for data centre operators.

The SSD delivers best-in-class performance with 14GB/s sequential reads and 10GB/s sequential writes, providing up to 67% better performance over similar competitive SSDs and allowing industry-leading performance for demanding workloads such as AI. Also, its random reads of 3,300 KIOPS are up to 35% better and random writes of 400 KIOPS are up to 33% better than competitive offerings.

AI workloads need high-performance storage solutions. The sequential and random read and write speeds of the 9550 SSD unlock performance for AI use cases. For example, LLMs require high sequential reads, while GNNs need high random read performance. The Micron 9550 SSD outperforms competitive offerings in critical AI workloads, with up to 33% faster workload completion times and up to 60% faster feature aggregation in GNN training with Big Accelerator Memory (BaM). The SSD provides up to 34% higher throughput for NVIDIA Magnum IO GPUDirect Storage.

"The Micron 9550 SSD represents a giant leap forward for data centre storage, delivering a staggering 3.3 million IOPS while consuming up to 43% less power than comparable SSDs in AI workloads such as GNN and LLM training," said Alvaro Toledo, vice president and general manager of Micron's Data Center Storage group. "This unparalleled performance, combined with exceptional power efficiency, establishes a new benchmark for AI storage solutions and demonstrates Micron's unwavering commitment to spearheading the AI revolution."

"Enhancing data centre efficiency and performance for AI workloads is pivotal to reducing costs and ensuring reliable operations for enterprises everywhere," said Rob Davis, vice president of Storage Technology at NVIDIA. "With the integration of NVIDIA technologies, the Micron 9550 SSD can provide powerful storage for AI."

"Innovation in storage technologies is a critical aspect of powering latency-sensitive workloads such as AI and business-critical enterprise applications," said Raghu Nambiar, corporate vice president of Data Center Ecosystems and Solutions at AMD. "Our deep collaboration with Micron and partners across the ecosystem will ensure the full capabilities of the new 9550 SSDs are enabled on AMD EPYC-based servers."

"Intel is pleased to see Micron enter the PCIe Gen5 market with the Micron 9550 NVMe SSD. This PCIe Gen5 SSD aligns well with Intel's PCIe Gen5 CPU platforms, specifically Intel's 4th Gen Xeon, 5th Gen Xeon, and Intel Xeon 6 processors," said Debendra Das Sharma, Senior Fellow and Chief I/O Architect at Intel. "Micron is a valued ecosystem partner to Intel, with a long history of providing well-integrated PCIe solutions with Intel-based platforms, including supporting solutions with Intel's Virtual RAID on CPU (Intel VROC), as well as AI workloads powered by Intel Gaudi AI accelerators."

The 9550 SSD features a vertically integrated architecture using Micron-developed technologies, providing flexible design choices and advanced security capabilities. The drive includes NVMe 2.0 and OCP 2.0 support, along with OCP 2.5 telemetry capabilities for advanced performance and health monitoring, all of which simplify data centre deployment and management at a large scale. The SSD is engineered with a focus on end-to-end security, featuring SED capabilities, compliance with SPDM 1.2, robust data encryption and other key security features. FIPS 140-3 Level 2 and TAA compliance options are also available for customers requiring higher security standards.

Available in capacities ranging from 3.2TB to 30.72TB and in U.2, E1.S and E3.S form factors, the SSD delivers a broad portfolio of offerings to allow performance, flexibility and scalability for today's PCIe Gen5 server designs. Designed to meet the demanding needs of top OEMs and hyperscalers, the SSD is sampling globally and is part of the company's industry-leading data centre memory and storage product portfolio that meets the growing demands of AI, HPC and many other workloads.