This 1993 Server Has Never Crashed — Now It's Being Retired
Booted up in 1993, this server still runs – but not for much longer (2017)
In 1993, IT architect Phil Hogan booted up a Stratus fault-tolerant server at Great Lakes Works EGL in Dearborn, Michigan. Twenty-four years later, it's still running with about 80% original parts and has never had an unplanned shutdown. But after the plant's parent company was acquired by U.S. Steel, an upgrade is planned for April, and the machine will finally be retired.
It never shut down on its own because of a fault it couldn't handle. I can't even think of an instance where we had an unplanned shutdown.
- colonwqbang
When you think about it, 24 years is not such a long time for a machine to keep doing what it's supposed to be doing. It says something about our profession that we find a 24-year service life surprising.
There are airliners that have been in service for over 50 years.
- mech422
I started working on Stratus machines right out of high school... They took me from backwoods New England to Wall St.
The were Awesome machines - don't let those filthy hobbitsis...err..tandem users cloud your judgement. Stratus was pure hardware FT, and tandem... wasn't :-P
Vos was pretty nice too - decent macro language - not all the utils you expect with a unix box, but in terms of the core OS and shell it was pretty good machine .. 40 years later I still love those machines and the career they helped get me into :-D
- nineteen999
We use to run Stratus VOS on Continuum series hardware at a lottery/poker machine company I worked at in the mid 2000's. It handled the jackpot system which decided which of 13,500 poker machines in our state would jackpot at any given time.
A reliable beast - never failed once in the entire time I worked there. Based on PA-RISC if I recall correctly.
- voidUpdate
> "This system runs an older version Stratus proprietary VOS operating system, which Hogan believes hasn’t been updated since the early 2000s. “It’s been extremely stable,’ he said."
That's not particularly surprising to be honest. If it's a server operating system, on hardware that doesn't change, there's not really a reason to update the OS unless there's a security problem found
- nathell
Reminds me of a C64C that, as of 2016, was used in production in a car workshop in Poland:
https://www.neoteo.com/en/a-commodore-64-stands-the-test-of-...
- K0balt
Story time: I got handed a ticket to go change a UPS in a “server room”.
I was in Fairbanks visiting family, I had some downtime, so I decided to do some “slumming” to break up the monotony and relive some of the good old days before I was more boardroom than server room.
Besides, a cool grand for what I figured was 2 hours work appealed to me on some “miss the struggles” level, and it was better than walking around the tourist traps or doing video calls at some depressingly fecund coffee shop.
So, I drive up in my borrowed SUV with peeling paint, grab my trusty tool bag I leave with family for adventures like this, and walk boldly through the doors of this apparently normal retail establishment, clipboard in hand. It was 2019, and the smell of denim and factory pressed shirts wafted through my sensorium as I walked through the awkwardly desynchronized automatic doors.
It was a perfectly normal, somewhat 90s nostalgic retail store.., but walking up the stairs (the elevator was out of service) to the second floor, I could just sense that something was a little off.
The office had a smell. I can’t say what it was, it was businesslike, and not unpleasant, but it spoke to me in an unknown language and I was at that moment curiously heartened that my contract was being paid by a 3rd party. It smelled of stagnant ideas, missed opportunities, and a fossilized board of directors.
I’m not just being colorful here in prose. All of these thoughts were projected into my forebrain by some […]
- kev009
You can find random PDP, VAX, even X86 systems that have lifespans 20+ years. As for a single boot probably a much smaller corpus, maybe some forgotten Sun SPARC in a telco on -48V DC power bus.
A VAXCluster or Sysplex(S/390) would I guess be more analogous but those can be a bit Ship of Theseus since you can change the hardware out over time.
- asa400
Definitely cool about the uptime, but as I have no experience on systems like this, I'm also curious about the economics of this as a business strategy.
How do the maintenance, development, and operations costs of a system like this compare to - for sake of argument - a typical line-of-business Java system running on commodity servers you own in a DC somewhere?
Can anyone with experience in both comment?