Portfolio of SSDs to power the AI revolution unveiled

Micron Technology, Inc. extends its industry leadership in storage with the launch of three new data centre SSDs, all built with Micron G9 NAND. This expansion of its storage portfolio includes the world's first PCIe Gen6 NVMe SSD, industry-leading capacity for an E3.S SSD and the lowest latency mainstream Gen5 SSD for AI data centres. These new products are highly performant, energy and space efficient, and validated with leading ecosystem partners to streamline qualification and deliver seamless integration, making them the perfect portfolio for the widely divergent needs of AI workloads.

"With the industry's first PCIe Gen6 SSD, industry-leading capacities and the lowest latency mainstream SSD, all powered by our first-to-market G9 NAND, Micron is not just setting the pace; we are redefining the frontier of data center innovation," said Jeremy Werner, senior vice president and general manager of Micron's Core Data Centre Business Unit. "This launch cements our leadership in data centre SSDs and signals a new era of performance, density and efficiency for our customers."

The unmatched 28GB/s performance of the 9650 SSD dramatically speeds up AI training and inference workloads. During inference, high throughput and ultralow latency are vital to allow real-time data access for large models, such as enterprise agents with extended context windows and retrieval-augmented generation pipelines. The 9650 delivers superior performance per watt compared to Gen5 SSDs, achieving up to 25% and 67% better storage energy efficiency for random writes and reads, respectively. The decrease in power consumption and carbon emissions allows data centres to meet sustainability goals while enhancing performance.

• Record-setting Gen6 performance:
  • Up to 28GB/s sequential read and 14GB/s sequential write speeds
  • Up to 5.5MIOPS random read and 900KIOPS random write speeds
• FIPS 140-3 Level 2 and Trade Agreement Act (TAA) compliant options help assure SSDs sold to the U.S. government are manufactured or substantially transformed in the United States or designated countries.
• Pioneering ecosystem collaborations, including prior public demonstrations with Astera Labs and Broadcom, accelerate adoption through proven interoperability.
• A liquid-cooled E1.S version is available for the most advanced AI servers.

"With up to 5.5 million IOPS for random reads, the Micron 9650 is purpose-built for AI pipelines' high-throughput, low-latency demands. This product helps ensure GPUs remain continuously fed with data, minimising idle cycles and maximising system efficiency. Combined with Dell's advanced server architecture, this innovation empowers enterprises to unlock new levels of performance and insight," said Arunkumar Narayanan, senior vice president of Compute and Networking, Infrastructure Solutions Group (ISG) at Dell Technologies.

"Advanced AI reasoning workloads require agents to swiftly access massive volumes of business and internet data," said Kevin Deierling, senior vice president of Networking at NVIDIA. "PCIe Gen6 SSDs like the Micron 9650 provide high-speed data access to support accelerated computing performance and efficiency for AI inference and training."

The Micron 6600 ION SSD produces breakthrough scalability featuring up to 245TBs in a single drive, allowing hyperscale and enterprise data centres to consolidate server infrastructure and build massive AI data lakes, all while lowering storage footprint, energy and carbon emissions. This offering increases storage density up to 67% over the competition and delivers over 88PB per rack using servers, drastically reducing TCO.

• The industry-leading 122TB E3.S SSD is approximately the size of a deck of cards, providing an incredible 2.4PB of PCIe Gen5 flash storage in a 1U server.
• The 122TB 6600 ION consumes only 1W per 4.9TB, offering 37% better energy efficiency than the three 36TB HDDs required to deliver the same capacity, all in less than a quarter of the space.
• For storage deployments with 2 exabytes of storage, the 6600 ION delivers up to 3.4 megawatt-hours of daily energy savings over HDDs, which is enough energy to power 124 average U.S. homes every day.
• The 6600 ION SSD provides the ultimate in data protection by supporting advanced enterprise-grade security features.

"With Supermicro's broadest selection of Petascale storage optimised servers supporting up to 36 E3.S SSDs, the Micron 6600 ION enables up to 4.42PB per 2U server, delivering the highest density and power efficiency for large capacity AI workloads," said Michael McNerney, senior vice president, Marketing and Network Security at Supermicro. "Our customers benefit from the collaboration between Supermicro and Micron to provide compact, energy-efficient and TCO-optimised systems."

"The Micron 6600 ION is a game-changer for AI infrastructure, delivering exceptional capacity and performance that enables WEKA customers to manage and process larger datasets with less infrastructure and lower energy use," said Ajay Singh, chief product officer at WEKA. "We're also excited about the Micron 9650 PCIe Gen6 SSD, which pairs perfectly with our Augmented Memory Grid technology, which extends GPU memory by leveraging ultra-fast NVMe to accelerate time to first token, boost token throughput, and help avoid the memory wall in high-throughput inference environments."

The 7600 PCIe Gen5 SSD offers class-leading performance, low latency and high-reliability QoS to support predictable, lightning-fast responsiveness for demanding data centre workloads like AI transformation, training and inference. Capable of delivering industry-best sub-1ms latency on the taxing RocksDB workload, the SSD is excellent for workloads where response time is critical. The 7600 SSD delivers the right balance of affordability, performance and predictable latency for most data centre workloads, including AI.

• With best-in-class sequential reads of 12 GB/s, the 7600 SSD outperforms competitive mainstream SSDs, with up to:
• 27% better sequential writes with 7 GB/s
• 5% better random reads with 2.1 MIOPS
• 100% better random writes with 400 KIOPS
• Unrivalled RocksDB workload performance and energy efficiency compared to competitive Gen5 SSDs

"At CoreWeave, we're relentlessly focused on pushing the boundaries of performance and helping our customers maximise their infrastructure efficiency," said Chetan Kapoor, chief product officer at CoreWeave. "The Micron 7600 SSD, with its strong performance and low latency, is a welcome addition that will help our customers scale out to hundreds of gigabytes of data throughput and accelerate their time to market."

Micron's vertical integration ensures that each of these SSDs is designed and manufactured with a Micron controller, G9 NAND, DRAM, firmware and manufacturing processes. This integration helps deliver exceptional quality and a more reliable, secure supply chain. Also, key security features, including hardware root of trust, SPDM 1.2 (attestation) for identity authentication and firmware verification, CNSA 2.0 dual signed PKI/LMS firmware binary, self-encrypting drive (SED) and Micron Secure Execution Environment, help secure data. OCP 2.6 support is available for the Micron 9650 and 6600 ION SSDs, and the 7600 SSD uses OCP 2.5 support.