Micron Unveils 9400 SSD: 30 TB Capacities With Best-In-Class Performance

Micron Technology announced that the new Micron 9400 NVMe solid-state drives are in mass production, with availability open for global OEM and channel partners. The new SSDs will be able to be utilized in high-level storage capacities servers, such as data centers, using AI development, machine learning, and HPC software suites. The Micron 9400 NVMe SSD will produce over 30 TB storage capacity and a seventy-seven percent improvement in IOPS (input and output operations per second). Micron anticipates the new drive to offer incredible performance over workloads compared to rival companies.

Micron's new 9400 SSD is the fastest PCIe 4.0 U.3 drive shipping for data centers that produce low latency levels consistently. Compared to previous Micron NVME SSDs, the new 9400 SSD is twice the maximum size for capacity. Standard two-rack-unit 24-drive servers using the previous generation Micron SSDs provided up to 737 TB of storage capacity on each server. Now the company can provide equal storage with half the amount of drives used, which is an essential cost-saving feature for enterprises.

High performance, capacity and low latency are critical features for enterprises seeking to maximize their investments in AI/ML and supercomputing systems. 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.

— Alvaro Toledo, Vice President and General Manager, Data Center Storage, Micron

The Micron 9400 SSD delivers 1.6 million IOPS with "100% 4K random reads" to offer better use of GPUs in the process of educating models used in machine learning. Most solid-state drives are created for reading and writing data on a system or server. The Micron 9400 SSD is different as the company focused on real-world and large-scale applications other than just artificial intelligence, such as the processing of online transactions, online trading, caching of data, and databases that require higher levels of performance not found in everyday situations.

Micron's 9400 SSD was tested in several mixed workloads to identify the performance of the new SSDs when matched against the competition. The company discovered

For RocksDB, a storage database renowned for its high performance and used for latency-sensitive, user-sensitive applications like spam detection or storing viewer history, the 9400 delivered up to 23% higher performance and up to 34% higher workload responsiveness.

For Aerospike Database, an open-source NoSQL database optimized for flash storage, the Micron 9400 demonstrated up to 2.1 times higher peak performance and superior responsiveness. Aerospike Database underpins time-critical web applications like fraud detection, recommendation engines, real-time payment processing, and stock trading – meaning the 9400 can deliver faster results for these time-sensitive use cases.

For NVIDIA Magnum IO GPUDirect Storage which enables a direct memory access data transfer path between GPU memory and storage, the Micron 9400 beat the competition by delivering 25% better performance in a dynamic system with compute-bound tasks — a critical improvement for AI environments.

For multi-tenant cloud architectures, the Micron 9400 delivers more than double the overall performance of a competitor's performance-focused SSD and up to 62% better response time.

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. 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.

— Liran Zvibel, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, WEKA

Micron's new SSD is backward compatible with U.2 sockets and designed for U.3 sockets, with capacities between 6.4 TB to 30 TB. With the larger capacity, businesses can ensure that the carbon footprint is less, assisting with the impact on the environment.

Supermicro designs innovative servers that provide maximum performance, configurability, and power savings to tackle the growing customer demand for increased capacity and efficiency. 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.

— Wally Liaw, Co-founder and Senior Vice President, Business Development, Supermicro

Enterprises and other database systems interested in more information about the new Micron 9400 solid-state drives can visit the company's official website.

News Sources: Micron, Micron 9400 SSD page