The Micron 9550 SSD comes with integrated controller, NAND, DRAM and firmware enabling improved levels of performance, power efficiency and security features for data centre operators.
The SSD delivers 14.0 GB/s sequential reads and 10.0 GB/s sequential writes to provide up to 67% better performance over similar competitive SSDs enabling demanding workloads such as AI. In addition, its random reads of 3,300 KIOPS are up to 35% better and random writes of 400 KIOPS are up to 33% better than other competitive offerings, according to Micron.
AI workloads require high-performance storage solutions and the device’s sequential and random read and write speeds can 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 provides 33% faster workload completion times and up to 60% faster feature aggregation in GNN training with Big Accelerator Memory (BaM), while it also provides up to 34% higher throughput for NVIDIA Magnum IO GPUDirect Storage.
“The Micron 9550 SSD represents a giant leap forward for data centre storage, delivering a staggering 3.3 million IOPS while 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, establishes a new benchmark for AI storage solutions and demonstrates Micron’s unwavering commitment to spearheading the AI revolution.”
“Enhancing data centre efficiency and performance for AI workloads is pivotal to reducing costs and ensuring reliable operations for enterprises everywhere,” explained Rob Davis, vice president of Storage Technology at NVIDIA. “With the integration of NVIDIA technologies, the Micron 9550 SSD can provide powerful storage for AI.”
“Innovation in storage technologies is a critical aspect of powering latency sensitive workloads such as AI and business critical enterprise applications,” said Raghu Nambiar, corporate vice president, Data Center Ecosystems and Solutions at AMD. “Our deep collaboration with Micron, and partners across the ecosystem, will ensure the full capabilities of the new 9550 SSDs are enabled on AMD EPYC-based servers.”
The Micron 9550 SSD excels in delivering industry-leading power efficiency to support a variety of AI workloads, including:
· GNN training with BaM: Up to 43% lower SSD average power and up to 29% reduction in overall system energy usage
· NVIDIA Magnum IO GPUDirect Storage: Up to 81% less SSD energy per 1TB transferred
· MLPerf: Up to 35% less SSD energy and up to 13% less system energy used
· Llama LLM training fine tuning with Microsoft DeepSpeed: Up to 21% less SSD energy used
The 9550 SSD features a vertically integrated architecture using Micron-developed technologies, providing flexible design choices and advanced security capabilities.
The drive incorporates NVMe 2.0 and OCP 2.0 support, along with OCP 2.5 telemetry capabilities for advanced performance and health monitoring, all of which are intended to simplify data centre deployment and management at large scale.
The 9550 SSD is engineered with a focus on end-to-end security, featuring self-encrypting drive (SED) capabilities, compliance with Security Protocols and Data Models (SPDM 1.2), robust data encryption and other key security features. Options for FIPS 140-3 Level 2 and TAA compliance 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 delivers 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 sampling globally and is part of Micron’s data centre memory and storage product portfolio.
