The Micron ION 6550, the industry’s first E3.S 60TB SSD, sets a new standard for energy efficiency while offering up to 67% greater density per rack, making it ideal for exascale data centers.
Micron Technology, Inc.has unveiled the Micron 6550 ION NVMe SSD, now entering customer qualification. It sets new benchmarks as the world’s fastest 60TB SSD and the industry’s first E3.S and PCIe Gen5 60TB drive. This product builds on the success of the award-winning 6500 ION and delivers exceptional performance, energy efficiency, endurance, security, and density to meet the rigorous demands of exascale data centers.
It redefines data center performance with 12GB/s throughput and a power efficiency of just 20 watts. Leveraging PCIe Gen5 technology and a 60TB E3.S form factor. The key features are:
- 179% faster sequential reads and higher read bandwidth per watt
- 150% faster sequential writes and 213% higher write bandwidth per watt
- 80% faster random reads with 99% higher read IOPS per watt
The drive’s active state power management (ASPM) feature enables an idle power consumption of 4 watts in the L1 state, improving energy efficiency by up to 20% during idle periods.
AI and High-Capacity Workloads
Tailored for AI-driven workloads, it is suitable in applications such as networked AI data lakes, file and object storage, and public cloud environments. It offers significant advancements in performance, efficiency, and capacity, making it ideal for AI, HPC, and data center applications. Key improvements include a 147% boost in NVIDIA Magnum IO GPUDirect Storage performance, 30% higher deep learning IO Unet3D performance, and 20% better energy efficiency. Additionally, AI model checkpointing is 151% faster compared to competitors, who use 209% more energy for the same task. Despite its substantial 61.44TB capacity, the drive completes a full write cycle in just 3.4 hours, greatly reducing rebuild times and speeding up deployment.
Designed to optimize data center operations, the Micron 6550 ION is available in E3.S, U.2, and E1.L form factors, enabling exceptional rack density. With the ability to store up to 1.2 petabytes per rack unit (U), it offers 67% greater density than competing solutions. In a 1U configuration with E3.S drives, it can achieve 44.2 petabytes per rack while delivering up to 3.3 times the performance per terabyte compared to 122.88TB U.2 drives. This consolidation minimizes the data center footprint and maximizes performance and energy efficiency. This space-saving efficiency enables substantial server consolidation, reducing data center footprint and operational costs.
Enhanced Endurance and Security
Engineered for durability, the 6550 ION provides 1.0 random drive writes per day (RDWPD) for 16KB random writes, offering 42% greater endurance than competing drives. Its comprehensive security features include:SPDM 1.2 for attestation and SHA-512 secure signatures, FIPS 140-3 L2 certification for government compliance and Manufacturing across multiple sites for supply chain resilience.
“The Micron 6550 ION SSD advances data-intensive AI applications, enhancing infrastructure capabilities with 5th Gen AMD EPYC processors,” said Raghu Nambiar, Corporate VP at AMD. “Combining VAST’s platform with the Micron 6550 ION delivers unparalleled capacity, performance, and energy efficiency,” stated Tomer Hagay, VAST Data. “The 6550 ION offers unmatched performance density and energy efficiency for enterprise AI,” added Nilesh Patel, WEKA’s Chief Product Officer.
Learn more by clicking here.
