Micron Technology, a major U.S. supplier of memory and storage solutions, has unveiled two innovative solid-state drives (SSDs) for data centers that could transform storage technology.
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The Micron 6500 ION NVMe SSD and Micron XTR NVMe SSD are designed to offer better performance, efficiency, and durability. They are being marketed as an efficient solution for companies grappling with the challenges of AI applications and other taxing workloads that lead to data expansion and higher operating expenses.
Alvaro Toledo, the Vice President and General Manager of Micron's Data Center Storage group, explained that their customers need new capabilities to meet the growing demands of data lakes and other high-performance workloads. These new SSDs are equipped to handle these challenges by offering improved performance, enhanced energy efficiency, and superior durability, making them an attractive option for large-scale corporations.
The Micron 6500 ION NVMe SSD stands out due to its high layer count, allowing it to deliver triple-level cell (TLC) performance at quad-level cell (QLC)-like cost by using Micron's 232-layer technology node. This innovation allows organizations to take advantage of the lower cost of QLC SSDs while still receiving the expected performance of TLC drives. Additionally, the Micron 6500 ION offers up to a 20% reduction in power consumption compared to competing QLC SSDs, enabling customers to reduce their carbon footprint.
As a result, the Micron 6500 ION and XTR SSDs have garnered considerable interest from customers who are deploying storage at scale. By combining large capacity, exceptional performance, and unmatched endurance, these SSDs enable customers to harness the power of AI without compromising on performance. Whether it is for object storage, distributed databases, or real-world workload testing, the Micron 6500 ION delivers the highest performance.
When it comes to high-performance, high-capacity NVMe SSDs for Ceph object storage workloads, the Micron 6500 ION is an optimal choice. It provides a combination of high performance and massive capacity in the same object store, as evident from meaningful improvements in all tested workloads.
For Cassandra NoSQL database, which is used for diverse workloads such as fraud detection and social media applications, the Micron 6500 ION SSD excels in offering the highest peak performance and read latency. These improvements have a significant impact on data center performance across a broad range of common NoSQL workloads. The Micron 6500 ION is an excellent choice for high-capacity SSD for Cassandra and other NoSQL database deployments.
The Micron 6500 ION would also provide massive storage capacity and workload results for WEKA software-defined storage, a high-performance, scalable software storage solution. The WEKA cluster with 48 Micron 6500 ION SSDs would offer up to 5.2 million IOPS and up to 112GB/s throughput per node and almost 1.5PB to the cluster. Nilesh Patel, WEKA's Chief Product Officer, praised the partnership with Micron for delivering improved power consumption and cost savings while providing high-performance hardware or cloud foundation required by the WEKA Data Platform.
According to Wally Liaw, Co-Founder and Senior Vice President of Business Development at Supermicro, customers that choose the new Micron 6500 ION SSD for their storage solutions can leverage its security features and the value of QLC with TLC performance.
In sum, the Micron 6500 ION and XTR SSDs would offer cutting-edge high-capacity and high-endurance NVMe SSDs that consume less power than previous technologies. This enables data center operators to substantially expand storage, reduce costs, and enhance data center sustainability.
The Micron 6500 ION SSD is a solid-state drive that leverages QLC (Quad-Level Cell) technology to deliver high capacity storage solutions with efficient performance.
QLC is a type of NAND flash technology that stores four bits of data per cell. This allows for higher storage densities, which means you can have larger capacities in a single drive. However, QLC typically trades off some performance compared to other types of NAND flash, like TLC (Triple-Level Cell).
TLC, on the other hand, stores three bits of data per cell and strikes a balance between capacity and performance. It offers better performance than QLC but typically has lower storage density.
With the Micron 6500 ION SSD, you get the benefit of QLC technology, which allows for high-capacity storage, along with performance optimizations to mitigate some of the typical performance trade-offs of QLC.
Micron achieves this by using advanced firmware and controller technologies to optimize performance, including implementing intelligent caching algorithms and utilizing large SLC (Single-Level Cell) write buffers, which provide faster write speeds. These optimizations help bridge the performance gap between QLC and TLC.
In summary, the Micron 6500 ION SSD combines the advantages of QLC technology, such as higher capacity, with performance optimizations to deliver a storage solution that offers a good balance between capacity and performance.