Micron Delivers High Capacity and High Endurance Data Center NVMe SSDs

• 17 May 2023
• TM Team
• 0 Comments

 Micron Technology, Inc. announced the release of two SSDs, the Micron 6500 ION NVMe SSD and the Micron XTR NVMe SSD. Designed to keep pace with the accelerating growth of data, these drives provide a major advancement for data centers by lowering operating costs and improving storage efficiency.

The Micron 6500 ION is a high-capacity SSD that offers a superior value over competitive QLC-based drives by providing best-in-class performance and enabling a more environmentally sustainable data center. The 6500 ION is able to deliver TLC performance and QLC-like cost due to Micron’s 232-layer technology node leadership compared to the competition’s use of sub-200-layer QLC technology. When paired with Micron 6500 ION drives or other SSDs, the Micron XTR SSD delivers extreme endurance that enhances system performance.

“Customers are looking for new capabilities to address the data growth and performance needs of artificial intelligence data lakes and other demanding workloads. As a result, we are seeing tremendous traction on the 6500 ION and XTR with customers who are deploying storage at scale due to their unrivaled combination of large capacity, superior performance, and amazing endurance,” said Alvaro Toledo, vice president and general manager of Micron’s Data Center Storage group. “The 6500 ION SSD offers QLC value with TLC performance and up to a 20% reduction in power consumption versus competing QLC SSDs, allowing our customers to reduce their carbon footprint. Together, these SSDs enable customers to leap ahead and harness the power of artificial intelligence without compromising performance.”

Micron 6500 ION SSD: QLC value. TLC performance. Micron innovation. ​

The Micron 6500 ION SSD is the demonstrably better performing high-capacity value SSD compared to the primary alternative with:

·         34% better average read latency

·         58% faster sequential writes

·         Up to 62% more 4KB random read IOPS

·         Over 30 times more 4KB random write IOPS at a queue depth (QD) of 128 and over 10 times more at QD1

·         More than 10 times better 4KB random write endurance (RDWPD)

The Micron 6500 ION also unleashes this high performance in real-world workload testing:

·         For Ceph object storage workloads, high-performance, high-capacity NVMe SSDs like the Micron 6500 ION are an ideal fit offering high performance and massive capacity in the same object store. Moreover, the Micron 6500 ION NVMe SSD test results show meaningful performance improvements in all tested workloads against the leading competitor.

·         Ceph object storage workload results:

·         100% sequential writes are up to 3.5 times better

·         100% sequential reads are up to 47% better

·         100% random reads are up to 49% better

·         Mixed I/O (sequential reads and writes) are up to 62% better

·         Mixed I/O (random reads and sequential writes) are up to 27% better

·         For Cassandra NoSQL database, a highly scalable, distributed database used for workloads such as fraud detection, global logistics, cloud document storage, and social media applications, the Micron 6500 ION SSD routinely demonstrates higher peak performance and better 99.99% (four nines) read latency than the competitor’s QLC SSD. The Micron 6500 ION’s peak performance is up to 2.6 times better than the competitor’s drive for the Yahoo! Cloud Serving Benchmark (YCSB) Workload C (100% read profile). The four nines read latency is up to 9.2 times better for the YCSB Workload F (recording user sessions profile). These improvements across a broad range of common NoSQL workloads will often have a significant impact on data center performance, making the Micron 6500 ION SSD the preferred high-capacity SSD for Cassandra and other NoSQL database deployments.

·         For WEKA software-defined storage, a high-performance, scalable software storage solution, the Micron 6500 ION proves that it can help deliver massive storage capacity and workload results without the compromises of the competitor’s QLC SSD. In a six-node cluster configuration, the WEKA cluster with 48 Micron 6500 ION SSDs delivers up to 5.2 million IOPS and up to a whopping 112GB/s throughput per node – all while providing nearly 1.5PB to the cluster.

“WEKA is leading a paradigm shift in how data is stored, managed, and processed. Our software-defined solution helps organizations transform their traditional, stagnant data silos into dynamic, fluid data pipelines that fuel next-generation workloads like AI, ML, and HPC seamlessly and sustainably,” said Nilesh Patel, WEKA’s chief product officer. “The WEKA Data Platform requires a high-performance hardware or cloud foundation to deliver maximum value to our customers. Through our collaboration with Micron and its new 6500 ION, we can deliver the performance our customers rely on with improved power consumption and cost savings.”