Server Runs Continuously For 24 Years (computerworld.com)

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.

Comments

Stratus has proprietary redundant *everything*.

[Toasterboy]

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.