PRO+ Premium Content/Storage
Access your Pro+ Content below.
The danger of ageism in the tech industry and ignoring the past
This article is part of the Storage issue of March 2018, Vol. 17, No. 1
Noted skeptic and pragmatist George Santayana once quipped, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." This often-quoted aphorism came to mind recently as I listened to a marketing VP caution me about a chat I was scheduled to have with his boss, the CEO of an up-and-coming storage vendor. He told me I would be smart to refrain from mentioning IBM or Sun Microsystems or virtually any vendor with innovations that predated the year 2000. The CEO apparently believed the advent of Google at the beginning of the millennium was such a game-changer it rendered all prior tech obsolete. Clouds, virtualization and software-defined had changed everything we know about IT, the VP said, and his boss would shut down any discussion that referenced the "Dark Ages." This wasn't the first time I heard this sort of ageism in the tech industry. A couple years ago, I did a deep dive into the question of what would keep older IT careerists relevant in the brave new world of clouds and virtualization. My research into ageism in ...
Features in this issue
-
NVMe SSDs: Is there a need for all this speed?
Everything you should know to decide if nonvolatile memory express is right for your enterprise and, if it is, how to plan for the future of flash storage.
-
Primary storage optimization overcomes a range of challenges
Enterprises turn to different products, technologies and tools to optimize primary storage, overcome data storage challenges and make networked storage deployments more efficient.
-
Ten ways to protect intellectual property and trade secrets
Industrial espionage is on the rise, and more data means more risk. Find out how to control the growth of data stores and secure your organization's most valuable assets.
Columns in this issue
-
The EU's GDPR will make us better storage managers
The European Union's General Data Protection Regulation has organizations worldwide rethinking storage management to their and their customers' benefit.
-
The danger of ageism in the tech industry and ignoring the past
Monolithic storage rules the day in spite of the advent of software-defined storage, because vendors and enterprises ignore data storage history and discount experience.
-
Is demand for data storage or supply driving increased storage?
Figuring out whether we're storing more data than ever because we're producing more data or because constantly evolving storage technology lets us store more of it isn't easy.