I'm having a discussion with a work colleague. I'm saying that a network with 100 elements will have pretty much 10 times as many failures as a network with 10 elements, ie a tech will need to replace faulty hardware 10 times more often. He suggests that the failure rate doesn't go up in a linear fashion and the failure rate will be significantly less than 10x, in fact only slightly more failures. This is not the probability of an outage etc, we are just talking in relation to the amount of parts that a tech would need to swap out in a given time frame.
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Of course it's linear, assuming identical components with identical reliability and identical environmental conditions.
But, it is rare to be able to make an apples-to-apples comparison between an installation of 10 servers and an installation of 100 servers. Small groups of servers, routers, switches, etc. are often subjected to inappropriate environments such as unventilated closets where they may be exposed to inappropriately high temperatures, dust, and lint. They may also be inappropriately connected directly to grid power that may expose equipment to power irregularities such as spikes, surges, and brownouts. On the other hand, typical "datacenter" environments have proper controls for temperature/humidity, clean air, clean power, etc. It is also important to bear in mind that a large-scale operator may be more likely to specify truly professional-grade equipment.
Equipment may be more reliable in a datacenter than in a broom closet, but that isn't due to some magical law of the universe that gives equipment safety in numbers. Instead, it is due to the deliberate optimization of many controllable factors.
Skyhawk
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