Stratus: Servers that won’t quit – The 24 year running computer
Does someone know why these systems - Stratus, Tandem/HP NonStop, etc. - appear to be relics of the past?<p>I can see how Google is better off spending money on software engineers than on hardware (thus, fault-tolerant distributed systems); but there's lots of systems that don't need Google-scale computer power, nor Google-style ultra-low-cost-per-operation hardware, but that really need to stay up - utilities, banks, every system at the center of a big enterprise.<p>Is the issue that modern software just isn't reliable enough to make hardware failures an important part of the downtime? Or is it just that systems like <a href="https://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1013428" rel="nofollow">https://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?langu...</a> are cheaper today? (I guess those actually work, right? The level of complexity involved is frightening...)