Micron Technology, Inc. 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 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. 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. 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 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 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.