High reliability performance of network is essential to minimize the possible network service interruption time, particularly in optical backbone networks where a large amount of data can be affected by a single failure. The existing studies on improvement of network reliability performance assume that failures of network devices are not related to the traffic load, which on the other hand, is not always true. For example, the lifetime of erbium doped fiber amplifier (EDFA) depends on the number of amplified lightpaths passing through. Encouraged by this observation, in this paper, we investigate the impact of used routing and wavelength assignment (RWA) algorithm on the number of failures in the network, and as a consequence on the network operational cost related to the failure reparation. We propose and evaluate a novel RWA approach, referred to as reliability performance aware RWA (RA-RWA), taking into account particular EDFA reliability performance characteristics with the goal of reducing the number of EDFA failures. The assessment results show that the operational cost related to EDFA failure reparation is impacted by the chosen RWA. The proposed RA-RWA provides 6% reduction, while other analyzed RWA algorithm, i.e., least loaded path (LLP), causes significant rise (up to 27%) of EDFA related failure reparation cost compared to the classical shortest path (SP) approach. In addition, RA-RWA offers further benefits in terms of reduced blocking probability compared to the SP. Concluding, we show that considering device reliability performance characteristics in RWA is important for the optical network operators as it can impact the network operational cost related to EDFA failure reparation.