The fastest data center storage in the world right now is the Micron 9550 NVMe SSD

Today we have yet another record-breaking product announcement from Micron where they released the 9550 NVMe SSD.

The data center storage product offers 14.0 GB/s sequential reads and 10.0 GB/s sequential writes as well as 3,300 KIOPS and random writes at 400 KIOPS. What's the hottest thing right now that can really utilize these speeds? LLMs and GNNs of course.

Micron touts the drive allowing up to 33% faster workload completion times and up to 60% faster feature aggregation in GNN thanks to the Big Accelerator Memory (BaM) together with 34% higher throughput via NVIDIA Magnum IO GPUDirect Storage.

Power efficiency is one of the top priorities for data center products which the Micron 9550 excels as well with up to 43% lower SSD average power in GNN training with BaM and up to 29% reduction in overall system energy usage, while NVIDIA Magnum IO GPUDirect Storage benefits from up to 81% less SSD energy per 1TB transfer.

Other algorithm training also benefits from it including up to 35% less SSD energy for MLPerf and up to 21% less SSD energy for Llama LLM training fine-tuning with Microsoft DeepSpeed.

The drive also comes with advanced security features, including self-encrypting drive (SED) capabilities, compliance with Security Protocols and Data Models (SPDM 1.2), and robust data encryption.

To make life easier, NVMe 2.0 and OCP 2.0, with OCP 2.5 telemetry compatibility are also on board for enhanced performance and health monitoring.

Availability

Capacities-wise, the Micron 9550 starts from 3.2TB and goes up to 30.72TB with various form factors of U.2, E1.S, and E3.S form factors.

Global sampling is currently underway and will soon be available for quotation for data centers looking to take the storage game to the next level.