Micron has just announced its new Micron 9550 PCIe Gen5 SSD, claiming the title of the world’s fastest data center SSD and setting a new standard for AI workload performance and power efficiency. The company has integrated its in-house Gen5 SSD controller, NAND, DRAM, and firmware into a single, world-class product with the new Micron 9550 Gen5 SSD. This integrated solution delivers class-leading performance, power efficiency, and security features, making it an ideal choice for data center operators.
Micron’s new 9550 SSD boasts impressive read and write speeds, achieving 14GB/sec sequential reads and 10GB/sec sequential writes. This translates to a performance increase of up to 67% compared to similar competitive SSDs, enabling the SSD to handle demanding workloads like AI applications with ease. The new Micron 9550 Gen5 SSD will be available in capacities ranging from 3.2TB to a massive 30.72TB capacity, offering flexibility to meet different storage needs. The SSD comes in U.2, E1.S, and E3.S form factors, ensuring compatibility with various systems.
The high read and write speeds of the Micron 9550 SSD unlock exceptional performance for AI workloads. Large language models (LLMs) require high sequential reads, while graph neural networks (GNNs) demand high random read performance, both of which the Micron 9550 SSD excels at. Micron’s new 9550 SSD surpasses competitive offerings in crucial AI workloads, showcasing up to 33% faster workload completion times and up to 60% faster feature aggregation in GNN training with Big Accelerator Memory (BaM). The company further highlights that its new Micron 9550 SSD delivers up to 34% higher throughput for NVIDIA Magnum IO GPUDirect Storage, further enhancing its capabilities for AI applications.
Industry leaders have lauded Micron’s new SSD. Alvaro Toledo, vice president and general manager of Micron’s Data Center Storage group, stated, “The Micron 9550 SSD represents a giant leap forward for data center 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. 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.” Rob Davis, vice president of Storage Technology at NVIDIA, added, “Enhancing data center efficiency and performance for AI workloads is pivotal to reducing costs and ensuring reliable operations for enterprises everywhere. With the integration of NVIDIA technologies, the Micron 9550 SSD can provide powerful storage for AI.” Raghu Nambiar, corporate vice president, Data Center Ecosystems and Solutions at AMD, emphasized the importance of innovation in storage technologies, stating, “Innovation in storage technologies is a critical aspect of powering latency sensitive workloads such as AI and business critical enterprise applications. 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.” Debendra Das Sharma, Senior Fellow and Chief I/O Architect at Intel, expressed his enthusiasm for the new SSD, saying, “Intel is pleased to see Micron enter the PCIe Gen5 market with the Micron 9550 NVMe SSD. This PCIe Gen5 SSD aligns well with Intel’s PCIe Gen5 CPU platforms, specifically Intel’s 4th Gen Xeon®, 5th Gen Xeon®, and Intel® Xeon® 6 processors. Micron is a valued ecosystem partner to Intel, with a long history of providing well-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.”
