The evolutionary economist Joseph Alois Schumpeter (1883-1950) argued that innovation led to “gales of creative destruction” that caused old inventories, ideas, technologies, skills, and equipment to become obsolete. Today, these gales are mixed with the airconditioning in the modern data center.
Schumpeter worried whether capitalism would survive, but perhaps a modern IT manager is more imperiled. Trends in processors, storage, networks, and software routinely turn yesterday's newest technology into today’s refuse.
By examining technology’s evolution, however, clear trends emerge. Components become faster, smaller, more capacious, and less expensive. Then, looking closer, a few more trends appear, and these trends apply equally to CPUs, networks, and storage. Ultimately, these trends led to the evolution of Spectra Logic’s Python architecture in the Spectra T950 library. The creative engineering of this library buffers―rather than buffets―modern IT managers.