Clear DefinitionsMTBF (Mean Time Between Failures)
1 min read
Pronunciation
[em-tee-bee-eff]
Analogy
Like measuring how many days a car engine runs on average before it needs a repair.
Definition
A reliability metric representing the average operational time between inherent failures of a system component, used to plan maintenance and assess uptime expectations.
Key Points Intro
MTBF quantifies expected reliability for hardware and services.
Key Points
Statistical average: Calculated as total uptime divided by number of failures.
Predictive maintenance: Schedule repairs before failures occur.
Service planning: Helps define SLAs and redundancy needs.
Component-level: Applied to disks, nodes, network gear.
Example
A data center’s SSDs have an MTBF of 1.5 million hours, informing replacement cycles and RAID redundancy design.
Technical Deep Dive
Collect failure logs over time, compute MTBF = Σ operational hours / Σ failures. Use Weibull analysis to model failure distribution and schedule proactive replacements.
Caveat
MTBF is a statistical estimate; individual components may fail sooner or later than average.
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