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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.
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.
Not quite the same as 24 year uptime. In the same vein, I have a Sun server that is still running since the mid-90's, part of a medical device and used to compile very particular software code for an old small-bore MRI system. We shut it down when the power goes out (very rare), but it's SCSI drives are still good.
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And no, those were the model numbers, not the CPU, which was the M68 series.
About the only thing non-redundant was the clock card. Voice of Experience. The power supplies had built in UPS's. Funny thing on the 808X systems, the power switch had "Off", "On", and past "On" was another state, which I forget what it was called. But if you replaced hardware while running, you'd push it up (it was spring loaded) to get it to IPL the new hardware.
I loved it because you could fold up 24 physical processors into 12, 6 or 4 logical with quorum voting. Get a bad CPU? It wouldn't miss a clock cycle, it's just lock it out and keep going. You could also run it completely unfolded.
These days, folks would say "so what?" - but "back in the day", your PC had a single core. It was a big deal. And even today, if you get a Check CPU, the system crashes on a PC.
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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.