David Black

Overview

David Black is a storage technologist at Dell Technologies who participates in the OCP data center storage specification effort. Dell's engagement with the OCP spec is principally motivated by preventing pointless industry divergence: Black holds that an industry-wide baseline significantly raises the probability that a drive "just works" across different deployments, freeing vendors and customers alike to invest effort in more productive work rather than reconciling incompatible implementations.

On the technical side, Black reported that what was previously framed as "air injection" has been generalized into event injection within the spec. Event injection allows misbehaviors that may not fully manifest as errors — subtle deviations a drive might exhibit before failing outright — to be deliberately introduced into a test environment, enabling engineers to observe and validate how both the host and the drive respond before any such behavior reaches the production floor.

Looking ahead to AI-driven workloads, Black identified two distinct emerging SSD classes he expects the industry to pursue. The first is an SSD optimized for an enormous number of small, 512-byte IOPS — on the order of tens of millions — targeting the fine-grained I/O patterns of GPU-adjacent inference and training jobs. The second is a nearline SSD: a high-capacity, cost-optimized device that shifts the traditional SSD/HDD boundary in the memory hierarchy down by one or two steps, enabling cold-tier economics with solid-state form factors.