In 1993 Phil Hogan, an IT application architect at Great Lakes Works EGL in Dearborn, Michigan, booted up a new Stratus Technologies fault‑tolerant server. By January 2017 the machine had been operating for 24 years without an unplanned shutdown caused by a hardware fault it could not handle, and Hogan said he “can’t even think of an instance where we had an unplanned shutdown.” He estimated that about 80% of the original components remained, with only disk drives, power supplies and a few other parts replaced over time.
The server runs Stratus’s proprietary VOS operating system, which Hogan believed had not been updated since the early 2000s but described as “extremely stable.” Its fault‑tolerant design duplicates critical hardware so the system can continue despite component failures. In 2010 Stratus recognized this machine as the winner of a longevity contest for its servers, at which point it had already been running for 17 years. Jason Andersen, Stratus’s vice president of business line management, noted that the company’s systems are “totally redundant in every way shape or form,” and that Stratus fault‑tolerant systems are used in payment processing, telecommunications, credit card processing, manufacturing, energy and natural resources. Users appreciated the reliability and simplicity of the character‑driven, green‑screen‑like interface.
Although Great Lakes Works had considered upgrading the system over the years, ownership or business‑cycle changes interrupted or delayed those plans. After the plant became part of United States Steel Corp. in 2015, a plan was set to replace the Stratus server in April 2017. Hogan likened the impending shutdown to retiring an old, faithful car, noting that only he would really know what the server had accomplished in its long life.