Micron Technology announced two SSDs — Micron 6500 ION NVMe SSD and Micron XTR NVMe SSD for its data center customers – promising cut in operating costs and improvement in storage efficiency.
The Micron 6500 ION SSD offers superior value over competitive QLC-based drives. 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.
“6500 ION SSD offers QLC value with TLC performance and up to a 20 percent reduction in power consumption versus competing QLC SSDs, allowing our customers to reduce their carbon footprint,” said Alvaro Toledo, vice president and general manager of Micron’s Data Center Storage group.
The Micron 6500 ION SSD is the better performing high-capacity value SSD compared to the primary alternative with:
34 percent better average read latency
58 percent faster sequential writes
Up to 62 percent 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 QD
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 percent sequential writes are up to 3.5 times better
100 percent sequential reads are up to 47 percent better
100 percent random reads are up to 49 percent better
Mixed I/O (sequential reads and writes) are up to 62 percent better
Mixed I/O (random reads and sequential writes) are up to 27 percent 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 percent 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 percent 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, 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.
The Micron 6500 ION reduces upfront purchase costs by coming in at a comparable price point to QLC SSDs while improving performance and endurance. It decreases operating expenses by using less power and requires less cooling.
The drive’s 30.72TB capacity and dense form factors facilitate server consolidation lessening server software license costs and carbon emissions. The 6500 ION also provides the industry’s most advanced security features including Federal Information and Processing Standards (FIPS) ASIC certifiability and compliance with the Trade Agreement Act (TAA).
Micron XTR SSD
The Micron XTR SSD delivers extreme endurance to enable the reliable caching necessary for write-heavy workloads. When paired with the Micron 6500 ION, the Micron XTR optimizes storage workloads with minimal investment when compared to storage class memory-based solutions.
The Micron XTR SSD is ideal for use cases that are write-intensive such as caching tiers, write buffering, logging and journaling, and online transaction processing workloads. Designed with Micron’s proven vertically integrated storage architecture, the Micron XTR SSD also features an industry-leading security suite to instill confidence in data center deployments.
The Micron XTR SSD allows:
Up to 35 random drive writes per day (DWPD) and up to 60 sequential DWPD; endurance ratings that far exceed conventional SSDs
Up to 35 percent of the random DWPD endurance at 20 percent of the cost of a SCM SSD
Up to 44 percent less power consumption
20 percent more usable capacity
In Microsoft SQL Server Analytics workload testing, where exceptional storage performance and optimal endurance are vital, the Micron XTR and Micron 6500 ION SSDs perform similarly to a solution using Micron 6500 ION and storage class memory (SCM) SSDs.
When the Micron XTR and 6500 ION SSDs are combined, the Micron XTR fulfills the same role as the SCM SSDs by delivering nearly identical query performance. The Micron 6500 ION offers primary storage to meet the SQL Server performance and capacity needs, while the Micron XTR enables the endurance needed for the write-intensive operations in SQL Server, such as the tempdb volumes.
The 30.72TB capacity Micron 6500 ION SSD is available in the U.3 (15mm) and E1.L (9.5mm) form factor. The Micron XTR is available in the U.3 (15mm) form factor in both 960GB and 1.92TB capacities.
