Re: Network SLA

[Martin Hannigan <martin () theicelandguy com>]

On Wed, Apr 15, 2009 at 7:10 AM, Saqib Ilyas <msaqib () gmail com> wrote:

> Hmmm. Good point. Perhaps the Internet traffic gets only a small share of
> the link capacity and the rest is reserved for corporate clients' VPN
> traffic etc. I was thinking more along the lines of corporate SLAs, not for
> Internet traffic.


For private, point to point, line, I agree with a previous posting on the
subject:

"As for the rest, CIR, Latency, Jitter, Loss ..... this can be tested
prior to customer handover with any number of tools and protocols
including IEEE 802.11ag/ah, ITU-T 1731,  IETF RFC2544. " -Rich Andreas

Asking to receive the testing report as part of an acceptance process is not
unusual.

For corporate IP service, you may want to measure end to end performance and
not get too specific in the core. Writing an SLA against city pair
performance is a responsible method to do this e.g. "Islamabad->Kabol not
equal to more than 1ms". That should encompass everything along the required
path(s) and hopefully  incent your provider to keep their network up to
snuff and their MTTR low. You may also consider codifying the MTTR i.e. MTTR
= < 2 Hours "or" service credit. (Again, depends on your economic power).

Don't forget that your power to negotiate SLA's with service credits is
proportionate to the size of the purchase. Buying 10 Mb/s  vs. 10 Gb/s
services are two different types of economics when it comes to SLA.

Best,

Martin


-- 
Martin Hannigan                               martin () theicelandguy com
p: +16178216079
Power, Network, and Costs Consulting for Iceland Datacenters and Occupants