Booted up in 1993, this server still runs – but not for much longer (2017)
A Stratus fault-tolerant server booted in 1993 at a steel mill ran continuously for 24 years without unplanned downtime before facing retirement.
summary is enough The article offers a neat piece of tech history, while the comment thread provides valuable context on hardware fault tolerance architectures.
summary
A Stratus fault-tolerant server installed at a steel manufacturing plant in 1993 achieved 24 years of continuous operation without an unplanned shutdown, running a proprietary VOS operating system. Despite minor component replacements like power supplies and disk drives, the system maintained high reliability until an upcoming corporate upgrade scheduled its retirement. Commenters expanded on the architectural differences between hardware-level fault-tolerant systems like Stratus and software-driven alternatives.
key points
- The Stratus server ran continuously from 1993 to 2017 without a single unplanned shutdown.
- Stratus achieved fault tolerance via complete hardware redundancy rather than software failovers.
- Commenters noted that extreme uptimes are less valued today as modern paradigms prioritize frequent patching and containerized ephemerality.
who should read it
Systems engineers and enterprise IT historians interested in legacy fault-tolerant architectures.
discussion positive
consensus
Commenters express nostalgia for robust legacy hardware while discussing the engineering tradeoffs of pure hardware-level fault tolerance versus software approaches.
pushback
Some argue that long uptimes are modern anti-patterns because regular patching and reboots are essential for security.
The OG Stratus FT was mc68k; what a beast. They moved to Intel i860 in the early 90s (XA series...I had a processor board from one hanging in my conference room back in the day), then HP-PA (Continuum series) in the 2000s and these days it's apparently virtualized on x86. Still very popular in the credit card processing world.
It provides a detailed technical history of how Stratus hardware evolved across processor architectures over the decades.
Generated by an LLM from the article and thread. Check the sources before relying on it.