World’s fastest and most energy efficient 60TB SSD

Micron Technology, Inc. has begun qualification of the 6550 ION NVMe SSD with customers. The Micron 6550 ION is the world’s fastest 60TB data centre SSD and the industry’s first E3S and PCIe Gen5 60TB SSD.1 It follows the success of the award-winning 6500 ION and is engineered to deliver best-in-class performance, energy efficiency, endurance, security, and rack density for exascale data centre deployments. The SSD 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 20W 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 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.”

The device is the industry’s first PCIe Gen5 60TB data centre SSD, offering class-leading read and write bandwidth. The drive is also the world’s first 60TB SSD with OCP 2.5 support, introducing active state power management (ASPM). This new feature enables the drive to idle at 4W in the L1 state versus 5W in the L0 state, improving energy efficiency by up to 20% when idling. More 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, allowing the drive to attain its published performance numbers using just 20W.

“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 61.44TB capacity, the Micron 6550 ION will enable our mutual customers to implement rack-dense AI infrastructure solutions without sacrificing performance.”