Reliability vs. Efficiency

If your life is going too smoothly right now, and you need to inject a little insomnia into your evenings, you could do worse than follow the posts and discussion at The Oil Drum: Discussions about Energy and Our Future.  'Peak Oil' is just one of many dismal trends covered, along with speculation about the problems and solutions surrounding the world's energy supply.  The posts and their comment threads are an education.

There was a fascinating post recently, "The Failure of Networked Systems", which generalized from the following observation:

The problem was eventually traced to a problem with one piece of software on one machine on our intranet. The software drivers for the network interface card on one machine were corrupt.

This raised a question in my mind: The Internet Protocol was originally designed to be a robust, reliable, redundant system. How does one piece of software on one machine bring down a network with thousands of nodes?

The answer is easy: Cost efficiencies.

Our Intranet network could have been built to be reliable, but instead it was built to be "efficient". Far from being a network of fail-safe systems, our network is a network of interdependencies. When the system was loaded, a single failure brought the whole system down. "Business Efficiency" has brought our network to its knees for two consecutive days.

If you're not bored already, the entire post is worth your time, as he gos on to draw what I think are useful analogies between an ip network crash and the potential for crashes in our energy, economic and financial networks, as these are increasingly engineered for efficiency over reliability, and as their usage is approaching their capacity. 

In perhaps overly simple terms, the basic way to achieve reliability is to keep spares, like a spare set of keys for the house or car, or a generator in your garage for when the power company is having trouble. Fault-tolerant computer systems rely on multiple copies of the resources they're to protect from faults.

Again in perhaps overly simple terms, the basic way to achieve efficiency is to get rid of spare capacity, like only having one car instead of two, or a smaller staff, supported by more automation, or multiple virtual servers running on a single machine. 

This pits reliability against efficiency in mortal combat, as they are very often in opposition. Business, by and large, seeks to develop efficiencies, whether in execution, like FedEx, or economies of scale, like Wal-Mart.  Government, by and large, seeks to offer reliability, whether in law enforcement, defense, social safety nets, like Social Security, or standards for thinks like water, food, non-toxic materials. 
Efficiency has been the dominant meme, perhaps since the industrial revolution.  Reliability may need to be brought back in to focus in the near future, I think.

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