Micron Launches Three NVMe Datacenter SSDs, Opens Micron Storage Solutions Center

Micron this week hosted an Enterprise Solutions event in Austin, TX, marking a turning point for the company with it taking a more active role as a software solutions provider for businesses. In addition, Micron announced three new NVMe-capable Enterprise PCIe & SAS solid-state drive families and even let loose some hints about the upcoming MX300; namely, it will launch next month and introduce Micron’s own 3D-NAND.

Micron’s Storage Solutions Center aims to solve particular use case scenarios for businesses with tailor-made products which it calls Micron Accelerated Solutions. The biggest collaboration was between Micron, Supermicro, and VMware to design “Ready Nodes”, self-contained all-flash servers ready for virtualization and compute. As a potential pairing is VMware Virtual SAN Ready Node, another all-flash solution designed to “take full advantage of the advanced data efficiency features like deduplication, compression and erasure coding that are now available for the first time in VMware Virtual SAN 6.2”. Product solutions developed to solve specific use cases and product needs for many different companies were also announced.

Micron’s 9100 NVMe PCIe SSD

Getting to the good stuff, up first is Micron’s 9100 Series which comes in PCIe 3.0 x4 HHHL and 2.5” U.2 form-factors, with capacities ranging from 800GB up to 3.2TB. The 9100 is the high-performance NVMe option that tops out at 3GB/s reads and 2GB/s writes, and 750K/160 read/write IOPs with 27 watts active power consumption.

On the opposite end of the spectrum is the 7100 Series which targets power sensitive and space constrained servers. This drive has the option of a diminutive M.2 form-factor or the more traditional 2.5” SAS U.2, though only the higher capacity U.2 models attain the 2.5GB/s reads and 900MB/s writes. Idle power is a miserly 3.7 watts, with max power consumption of 8.25w for the M.2 form-factor or 12.5w for the larger U.2 siblings. Capacities will begin at 400GB and range up to 1.92TB.

Last but certainly not least is the S600DC-series of SAS drives utilizing 16nm eMLC flash. Models and capacities are too numerous to list, but these solid-state drives were designed to be traditional 10K and 15K RPM SAS drive killers. The S600DC drives aim to provide much higher capacity and performance in an identical 2.5” form-factor all while matching an equivalent cost-per-gigabyte ratio of equivalent spindle drives. There are four models within the S600DC family and they start at 200GB  and go up to a whopping 4TB in a 2.5” form-factor, or up to 800GB in 1.8” models.