For my part (sample size of one means nothing of course)... The stratus server I worked with in around 2002 was, I believe, one of the first to move towards st

For my part (sample size of one means nothing of course)... The stratus server I worked with in around 2002 was, I believe, one of the first to move towards standard x86 configurations and Windows OS. They did so because, no matter how reliable your server, executives were jumping on Windows as an application server bandwagon and developers were targeting it. There were several driver and firmware bugs that would BSOD the whole server, and bring the entire fault tolerant OS down. Moreover, storage was a hack job. They couldn't make hardware RAID cards work in that configuration, and Windows software RAID was a joke, so you were stuck with Veritas storage software. Twice we applied Windows Service Packs only to find it would BSOD due to a Veritas software incompatibility. If it was a more average server I'd apply said update to a test server first, but no one could afford a test Stratus so you were always testing in production, which doesn't help reliability. Here's a picture of it. It became my homeserver for a few years but frankly it was less reliable than a desktop. http://imgur.com/a/7010z http://imgur.com/a/7010z