Quote Originally Posted by PoeticallyPsyco View Post
Depends on how you're looking at it, what the goals for that redundancy were. If your goal is to be able to continue working unimpeded when something breaks, thus saving money, then yeah, waiting for everything to break is a terrible plan. If your goal is to save money on repairs, though, it makes more sense to wait for the back-ups to break, too, so they can be repaired at the same time - theoretically doubling how long you went without a break for a relatively minor increase in repair costs. Which one's a better idea depends on a lot of things, including how disruptive getting repairs done is, how expensive the parts are relative to the cost of labor for repair, and how bad it would be if whatever it is stops working for a time.
And frequently, whether the supervisor/manager is abstracted/short-sighted enough to disapprove of spending time/money making repairs that won't significantly improve near-term performance.