By Philbert Shih, theWHIR.com
April 22, 2005 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — The service level agreement lays out the groundwork for the relationship between the hosting provider and the customer. It sets parameters for what a customer can expect with regards to their hosting service and gives hosts a reference point to measure their own performance. When SLAs are re-written, they can reflect the new capabilities of a host.
Earlier this week MCI (mci.com), one of the world’s largest Web hosts, announced that it would raise the bar on the service level agreement for its managed network services available with the company’s hosting, managed security and contact center services.
The changes significantly increase the companys overall disaster recovery capabilities. MCI is reducing the restoration guarantee in its SLA to 3.5 hours in the US, four hours for key centers in Western Europe, Asia and Canada, and six hours in remote regions around the world. In contrast, says Cliff Cibelli, senior product manager for MCI, competitors offer time to restore in the four-hour range.
“We certainly believe that this SLA leads the industry,” Cibelli told theWHIR. “This will give customers great peace of mind.”
MCI is also extending its standard SLA to third party networks, guaranteeing that it can provide similar or better service than third-party providers Cibelli says MCI is the first carrier to do this. According to the new SLA, MCI is promising a four-hour time to repair for third party networks in the US. MCI currently manages over 22,000 non-MCI connections from more than 60 network service providers around the world.
A key component of MCI’s enhanced SLA is the time-to-repair component, says Cibelli, which no longer guarantees mean repair times. “We’ve eliminated the word mean from our vocabulary. It is now a time to repair instead of a mean time to repair.”Another change, he says, is the offer of availability based upon the site instead of the network. This gives customer a detailed and comprehensive site-level response from MCI, and makes it easier for customers to track performance.
MCI’s SLA also includes service commitments for network availability, restoration, service installation, proactive outage notification and change management. Real-time notification and status updates are available and all performance commitments are backed with financial credits.
The strengthened SLA enables MCI to minimize downtime for its customers, which according to analysts’ estimates can cost $40 per hour, per employee. And faster repair times drive total cost of ownership savings in the event of an outage, MCI says. The key is “minimizing the financial risk of downtime and making sure that you can repair a network and get a customer up and in business,” says Cibelli.
This week’s announcement builds on MCIs February unveiling of its Rapid Fault Isolation capabilities, which monitors networks, isolating and pinpointing anomalies or faults as soon as they occur. Rapid Fault Isolation reduces human error and cuts the network management cycle, resulting in faster restoration times. And it is these enhanced network management capabilities combined with the company’s 5,400 globally deployed technicians and fault management architecture, says Cibelli, that has ultimately enabled MCI to put “some teeth and backing” into its managed network services SLAs.
“We’ve created an expert system that can really identify faults along every step of our network, isolate where that failure point is, without any human intervention,” says John Shultz, senior manager of managed network services at MCI. “That is a significant reason why we re-looked at our SLAs and have lowered them.”
In conjunction with the announcement, MCI also introduced management and monitoring capabilities down to the application level through its new Apps Integrity product. The tool shows a view of application traffic across an entire network, and of individual flows from client to server, server to client and client to client.MCI says Apps integrity will enable businesses to better understand how their networks are performing down to the application level. And network mangers will be able to mange and troubleshoot applications in greater detail, identifying bandwidth hogs and isolating poor performance between the network, server and application.
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