As computers and their accessories become smaller, cheaper, and faster the providers of news, retail sales, and other services we now take for granted on the Internet have met their increasing computing needs by putting more and more computers, hard disks, power supplies, and the data communications linking them to each other and to the rest of the wired world into ever smaller spaces. This has created a new and quite interesting percolation problem. It is no longer desirable to fix computers, storage or switchgear which fail in such a dense array. Attempts to repair things are all too likely to make problems worse. The alternative approach, letting units “fail in place”, be removed from service and routed around, means that a data communications environment will evolve with an underlying regular structure but a very high density of missing pieces. Some of the properties of this kind of network can be described within the existing paradigm of site or bond percolation on lattices, but other important questions have not been explored. I will discuss 3D arrays of hundreds to thousands of storage servers (something which it is quite feasible to build in the next few years), and show that bandwidth, but not percolation fraction or shortest path lengths, is the critical factor affected by the “fail in place” disorder. Redundancy strategies traditionally employed in storage systems may have to be revised. Novel approaches to routing information among the servers have been developed to minimize the impact.
