Short Bytes: A computer server at Double Eagle Steel Coating Co. is running without any hardware issue since the year 1993. It was built by Stratus Technologies and still has almost 80% of its original hardware after several repairs and replacements. The server may go out of service after a planned upgrade in April this year.
ou might be using the latest ultrabook or smartphone to visit Fossbytes. But there are some badass grandpa computers still managing to stand firm at their place since decades. One such old computer, a Commodore 64, was spotted at an auto-repair shop last year in Poland.
Now, this time it is not a computer but a data server – spotted by Patrick Thibodeau – running since the last 23 years without a glitch. The fault tolerant server, built by Stratus Technologies, was set up by an IT application architect Phil Hogan in 1993 at Great Lakes Works EGL. The company is now known as Double Eagle Steel Coating Co. It was acquired by United States Steel Corporation in 2015 and Hogan has been there for 28 years.
The data server was first spotted in the year 2010 when Stratus ran a competition to find their oldest running Stratus server in the world. Hogan’s server was then 17-year-old and won the contest.
“It never shut down on its own because of a fault it couldn’t handle. I can’t even think of an instance where we had an unplanned shutdown,” he said.
Over the years, there were several component replacements to the Stratus server, but Hogan said that the server still has around 80% of its original hardware. The server’s operating system is a Stratus proprietary, and Hogan believes it hasn’t been updated since the 2000s.
It’s highly unlikely that the server might end up doing another couple of years. It is running fine but there are plans to upgrade the system by April.
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