Micron Technology has announced the Micron 9400 NVMe SSD is in volume production and immediately available from channel partners and to global OEM customers. The drive is designed to manage the most demanding data center workloads, particularly in artificial intelligence (AI) training, machine learning (ML) and high-performance computing (HPC) applications, the company said.
The new Micron 9400 NVMe SSD delivers an industry-leading 30.72 terabytes (TB) of storage capacity, superior workload performance versus the competition, and 77% improved input/output operations per second (IOPS). The drive is the world's fastest PCIe Gen4 data center U.3 drive shipping and delivers consistently low latency at all capacity points, the company claimed.
The Micron 9400 SSD's industry-leading capacity of 30TB doubles the maximum capacity of Micron's prior-generation NVMe SSDs. A standard two-rack-unit 24-drive server loaded with 30.72TB Micron 9400 SSDs provides total storage of 737TB per server. By doubling capacity per SSD, Micron is enabling enterprises to store the same amount of data in half as many servers.
The Micron 9400 SSD also sets a new performance standard for PCIe Gen4 storage by delivering 1.6M IOPS for 100% 4K random reads, the company indicated. The drive's capacity and performance enable larger datasets and accelerate epoch time, the total number of iterations of data in one cycle for training machine learning models - leading to more efficient utilization of graphics processing units (GPU).
While many SSDs are designed for pure read or write use cases, the Micron 9400 was designed with real-world applications in mind, the company said. Mixed workloads are prevalent in many data center applications, including caching, online transaction processing, high-frequency trading, AI, and performance-focused databases requiring extreme performance.
"As the world's most innovative organizations continue to adopt cloud and digital-first strategies, WEKA and our partners are focused on removing obstacles to data-driven innovation," said Liran Zvibel, co-founder and chief executive officer of Weka, in Micron's statement. "High-performance, high-capacity storage like the Micron 9400 SSD provides the critical underlying technology to accelerate access to data and time to insights that drive tremendous business value."
Also in the same statement, Supermicro co-founder and senior VP of business development Wally Liaw said "the Micron 9400 SSD delivers an immense storage volume of over 30TB into every drive while simultaneously supporting optimized workloads and faster system throughput for advanced applications."
"High performance, capacity and low latency are critical features for enterprises seeking to maximize their investments in AI/ML and supercomputing systems," said Alvaro Toledo, VP and GM of data center storage at Micron. "Thanks to its industry-leading 30TB capacity and stunning performance with over 1 million IOPS in mixed workloads, the Micron 9400 SSD packs larger datasets into each server and accelerates machine learning training, which equips users to squeeze more out of their GPUs."
The Micron 9400 SSD is available in a U.3 form factor that is backward-compatible with U.2 sockets and comes in capacities ranging from 6.4TB to 30.72TB.
