In 1993 a Stratus server was booted up by an IT application architect -- and it's still running. An anonymous reader writes:
"It never shut down on its own because of a fault it couldn't handle," says Phil Hogan, who's maintained the server for 24 years. That's what happens when you include redundant components. "Over the years, disk drives, power supplies and some other components have been replaced but Hogan estimates that close to 80% of the system is original," according to Computerworld.
There's no service contract -- he maintains the server with third-party vendors rather than going back to the manufacturer, who says they "probably" still have the parts in stock. And while he believes the server's proprietary operating system hasn't been updated in 15 years, Hogan says "It's been extremely stable."
The server will finally be retired in April, and while the manufacturer says there's some more Stratus servers that have been running for at least 20 years -- this one seems to be the oldest.
Stratus has proprietary redundant *everything*.
By Toasterboy
•
2017-Jan-28 20:07
• Score: 4, Informative
• Thread
Stratus has proprietary redundant *everything* on their machines, and runs in lockstep; they literally have two of everything in there... two motherboards, two cpus, two sets of RAM, etc. If anything weird happens on one side, they fail over to the other motherboard running in lockstep on the other blade in the chassis. Combine that with running an extremely conservative set of drivers that are known stable, and you can get six nines out of the thing. Stratus is typically used for credit card processing and banking applications where it's not ever acceptable to have a machine down for the time it takes to reboot. Really, really, really expensive though. You wouldn't want to use one of these for anything normal.
Re: Not "continuously" in the geek sense of the wo
By moofrank
•
2017-Jan-28 20:15
• Score: 5, Interesting
• Thread
I used to work on Stratus servers, and I think the company was purchased by IBM in the late 90s.
For each running component in the system, there are three physical instances. They use a voting system to drop any disagreement in RAM or the outcome of an instruction. In the 3 years I dealt with them, I never saw a system failure, and the only outages were caused by planned system upgrades. OS stuff. All of the hardware was hit swapped.
These were multimillion dollar machines that basically had the CPU performance of a couple of 68000 CPUs.
I personally witnessed a take out of a Novell 2.x file server which had a 16 year uptime. This was for a school system, and they had forgotten where the file server was. Stuffed in the back of a janitorial closet, and dust covered. That wasn't any sort of fancy hardware.m, but an old microchannel PC.
If you don't need to patch them, computers run for a long time.
Re:BS title - actually, probably true
By chromaexcursion
•
2017-Jan-28 20:19
• Score: 5, Insightful
• Thread
Stratus are an old school redundant parallel architecture. You can take a node off line without taking the system down. Beyond that multiple levels of redundancy with components. Portions of the system have certainly been taken down, but the system as a whole kept running.
No one would consider that kind of architecture now; much too expensive, when other solutions are available now. The key word in the previous sentence is "now". Probably not an ad for Stratus, they don't really exist anymore.
The equivalent now is a server farm. There are systems (server farms) that have been running for over a decade.
Re:Is it still the same server?
By Mysticalfruit
•
2017-Jan-28 20:28
• Score: 5, Informative
• Thread
Since this machine is running VOS, and from the '93 time frame it's either an X/AR with i860's or a Continuum with PA-RISC. I'll spitball and say it's a Continuum.
These machines are not like desktops. The hardware and software is extremely tightly coupled. Multiyear uptimes are not uncommon on Stratus VOS machines.
Full disclosure, I'm a former Stratus Employee.
Re:Is it still the same server?
By wonkey_monkey
•
2017-Jan-28 20:46
• Score: 5, Funny
• Thread
If you change "Theseus" to "farmer" and "ship" to "axe," is it still the same philosophical problem?