One of my customers is an ASP. The ASP code and infrastructure were built way back in the dot-boom years. Active development on the software has stopped long ago. But the software and infrastructure was good enough to keep its existing customers and attract new one for many, many years (9+ years).
Flash forward to 2010 and the customer is migrating to a new semi-managed datacenter provider. As I was working the with the existing infrastructure, I noticed this
Notice the Uptime number in the upper right corner. <span style=”font-weight: bold;”>Yes, that says 869 days. </span>This is one of two F5 BigIPs that were purchased in 1999. These two load balancers have been in production use for > 10years. In fact, when this load balancer was booted up last, it was the passive node in an active-passive configuration. About 200 days ago, the active node failed and this load balancer has been chugging along since.Stability in network appliances is a good thing.