In 1993, President Bill Clinton was in the first year of his presidency, Windows NT 3.1 and Jurassic Park were both released, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed, and Phil Hogan, an IT application architect, booted up a brand-new Stratus Technologies fault tolerant server.
A lot has changed in 24 years, but one thing hasn’t: The Stratus server is still in operation and Hogan — who works at steel products maker Great Lakes Works EGL in Dearborn Mich. — continues to keep it that way.
This is a fault tolerant server, which means that hardware components are redundant. 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.
«It never shut down on its own because of a fault it couldn’t handle,» said Hogan. «I can’t even think of an instance where we had an unplanned shutdown,» he said.
This is a famous server. In 2010 Stratus held a contest to identify one of its servers that had been running the longest.
