There are airliners that have been in service for over 50 years.
Are there any airliners that have flown for 24 years non-stop?
But really didn't the NSA have something that was roughly an airliner in perpetual flight?
it's more impressive to me that the electric fans within the Stratus server still operate than it is that the chips still work, and if we're going with the plane metaphor it's the silicon that puts the thing into the air, not the simple fans.
So really it just boils down to "well, the planes work is harder." as to why it fails, which is of course abstract and unsatisfying; comparing the comparative lifetime workloads of a chip that has shifted trillions of bits versus some jet engines that have moved millions of kilograms around the world.
and then another layer comes and makes it even weirder : the vast majority of hardware around the world that has been EoLd and replaced has been in that situation due to software, not the hardware itself; a paradigm that really doesn't exist in the physical engineering world in the same was as it does CS.
These two have very distinct failure modes. The failure mechanisms for solid state electronics are much more similar to those for static equipment (corrosion, thermal fatigue, creep, ...)
It seems when people think of a server today, they think of a single computer, if not some software server somewhere in the cloud. These subject kinds of servers are far closer to complex systems of separate components, more like a network system, it’s why components of what are really separate networked computers can and need to be replaced.
An airliner is of course also made up of components that are also systems, however at least in my mind, the difference is the actual expected use case. An airliner is not a good comparison because it is never expected to remain in continuous operation, e.g., that at least one engine is always running even when it is being overhauled or repaired, to satisfy a requirement of continuous operation.
What is remarkable is that apparently that VOS thing has never crashed. I wonder if they also do software redundancy under the hood to keep uptime going during reboots. If the CPU is hotswappable, it must have something.
The main computer system in the Space Shuttle is an excellent example of this. It had 5 identical IBM System/4 Pi machines. Three of them ran identical code and handled the same work. The fourth ran a completely different codebase to handle the same work, preventing a bug in the main code from killing the whole system. A fifth computer handled other tasks but could be swapped over to the critical role if needed. You could lose 2/5 computers and still have insurance against a cosmic ray flipping a bit.
Many servers I've owned had multiple years of uptime, and the only reason they'd go down is because they will get decommissioned or because of power outage.
The article says:
> disk drives, power supplies and some other components have been replaced but Hogan estimates that close to 80% of the system is original.
so I am guessing there was no reboots, nor CPU replacements.
Yes, this drastically understates the change in computing but the actual technology hasn't changed that much, it just got denser and faster.
The biggest change from then to now is probably the amount of solid state electronics onboard. That's ridden roughly the same curve as other industrial and commercial applications.
IBM mainframes, famously, phone home if they detect a faulty component. Service personnel will be on site, same day, to replace it before you even knew it was there, let alone had the opportunity to ask.
...with a very aggressive maintenance cycle (typical part life is 1000-10000 hrs of service). Most airliners of that vintage resemble the "Ship of Theseus" in real life.
On other side only moving element would be hard drives and only wear element really would be the electrolytic caps.