Micron Introduces World’s Fastest Data Center SSD

BOISE, Idaho, July 23, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Micron Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq: MU) today announced the availability of the Micron 9550 NVMe™ SSD – the world’s fastest datacenter SSD and the leader in AI workload performance and energy efficiency.¹ The Micron 9550 SSD showcases Micron’s deep expertise and innovation by integrating its own controller, NAND, DRAM, and firmware into a single, world-class product. This integrated solution provides industry-leading performance, power efficiency, and security features for data center operators.

The Micron 9550 SSD delivers best-in-class performance at 14.0 GB/s sequential reads and 10.0 GB/s sequential writes, delivering up to 67% better performance than comparable competing SSDs.¹ and enables industry-leading performance for demanding workloads like AI. Additionally, its 3,300 KIOPS random reads are up to 35% better and 400 KIOPS random writes are up to 33% better than competing offerings.¹

AI workloads require high-performance storage solutions. The 9550 SSD’s sequential and random read/write speeds unlock performance for AI use cases. For example, large language models (LLMs) require high sequential reads, while graph neural networks (GNNs) need high random read performance. The Micron 9550 SSD outperforms competing 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).² The Micron 9550 SSD also offers up to 34% higher throughput for NVIDIA Magnum IO™ GPUDirect^® Storage.³

“The Micron 9550 SSD represents a quantum leap for data center storage, delivering an astonishing 3.3 million IOPS and 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, sets a new benchmark for AI storage solutions and demonstrates Micron’s unwavering commitment to leading the AI ​​revolution.”

“Improving data center efficiency and performance for AI workloads is critical to lowering costs and ensuring reliable operations for businesses everywhere,” said Rob Davis, vice president of Storage Technology at NVIDIA. “With the integration of NVIDIA technologies, the Micron 9550 SSD can provide high-performance storage for AI.”

“Innovation in storage technologies is a critical aspect of driving latency-sensitive workloads like AI and mission-critical business applications,” said Raghu Nambiar, corporate vice president, Data Center Ecosystems and Solutions at AMD. “Our close collaboration with Micron and partners across the ecosystem ensures that the full capabilities of the new 9550 SSDs are enabled on AMD EPYC-based servers.”

“Intel is pleased to have Micron enter the PCIe Gen5 market with the Micron 9550 NVMe SSD. This PCIe Gen5 SSD is a great fit for Intel’s PCIe Gen5 CPU platforms, particularly Intel’s 4^e Generation Xeon^®5th generation 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 of Intel, with a long history of delivering tightly 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 Micron 9550 SSD excels in delivering industry-leading power efficiency to support a variety of AI workloads, including:³

• GNN training with BaM: Up to 43% lower SSD average power and up to 29% reduction in total system energy consumption
• NVIDIA Magnum IO GPUDirect storage: Up to 81% less SSD power per 1TB transferred
• MLPerf: Up to 35% less SSD energy and up to 13% less system energy consumption
• Llama LLM training fine-tuning with Microsoft DeepSpeed: up to 21% less SSD energy consumption

The 9550 SSD features a vertically integrated architecture utilizing proprietary 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 center deployment and management at scale. The 9550 SSD is designed with a focus on end-to-end security, with self-encrypting drive (SED) capabilities, security protocol and data model compliance (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 9550 SSD offers a broad portfolio of offerings to enable performance, flexibility, and scalability for today’s PCIe Gen5 server designs. Designed to meet the demanding requirements of top OEMs and hyperscalers, the 9550 SSD is sampled globally and is part of Micron’s industry-leading Portfolio of memory and storage products for data centers that meets the growing demands of AI, HPC and many other workloads.

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About Micron Technology, Inc.

We are a leader in innovative memory and storage solutions that transform the way the world uses information to enrich life for everyone. With a relentless focus on our 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 our 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. For more information about Micron Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq: MU), visit micron.com.

© 2024 Micron Technology, Inc. All rights reserved. Information, products and/or specifications are subject to change without notice. Micron, the Micron logo and all other Micron trademarks are property of Micron Technology, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

¹ Performance comparisons are based on publicly available datasheet information for performance-oriented 1 DWPD 7TB SSDs competing SSDs. Competitors are defined as Kioxia and Samsung.

² Based on internal Micron testing.

³ Competitive comparisons with the best competing 7.xTB read-intensive SSDs as listed in footnote 1, available on the market and tested in Micron labs.