SLA

Many institutions have the experience that because they have never signed a contract, as is the case with ordinary suppliers, it is unclear whether there is an agreement and what it contains.

DeiC is not an ordinary supplier, but rather a purchasing community and collaborative project as defined in the Finance Act §19.17.06 and further in the network's statutes. When you join the research network, you have an obligation to pay user fees and a right to receive a number of services. This continues until you opt out.

This is a collective form of agreement that the affiliated institutions can influence through the research network's steering committee. Therefore, we have so far had the practice of not drawing up a contract of affiliation unless the terms of affiliation deviate from the common statutes.

The overall agreement on connection to the research network is not currently available as one unified document, but appears in a number of documents and other information collected on the DeiC website. These include statutes, steering committee minutes, terms of connection, service descriptions, the payment model and also this paper: the research network SLA.

Operational efficiency is the ratio between the time the service in question has actually been in operation and the time the service could be expected to be in operation (the operational period). This is calculated for each quarter.

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(*) Full redundancy here also means that the capacity of the two connections is equal or that the smaller connection can carry all traffic in all cases.

All services in operation (except certain types of lightpath connections) are automatically monitored. The aim is for this monitoring to be so comprehensive that it is possible to determine whether a service is operational based on this alone.

Operational messages are sent out via Serviceinfo, which you sign up for at www.serviceinfo.dk. Measurements and statistics on traffic and load are published on DeiC's website.

Net operations can be contacted at netdrift@deic.dk, which sends an acknowledgement from the case management system as soon as an email is received. This may take a number of minutes, due to the greylisting that the spam filter in front of this email address performs. Processing of inquiries to this address can only be expected with certainty during business hours, which are 9.00-16.00 Monday - Friday.

Net operations can be contacted during business hours on tel. 35 888 222, which is manned as far as possible during business hours. The phone number is a group call to the employees in network operations, so there is no helpdesk function in front, and it may therefore occur in some cases that all employees on duty are busy, and apart from forwarding to the department secretary, there is no queue system.

Escalation can be made to Jan Ferré (2160 8012) and Martin Bech (2176 0625)

Because we have chosen to do without an actual helpdesk function in front of network operations for the time being, it is not possible to calculate and manage in relation to a specific response time for inquiries to network operations, but as mentioned above, the aim is that the phones are actually answered, and in that case the answer is immediate.

Once an inquiry about an operational problem has reached an employee (who either has the user on the phone or has reached the relevant email), the starting point is that this time counts as the start of an alarm, just like alarms from the monitoring. The response time and remediation time for the operational issue in question then follows the times specified in the operational goals for the service in question.

Some services, such as Adobe Connect and WAYF.dk, are currently not supported by the network operations group, but by those responsible for the services. This is stated in the description of the individual service, which can be found on DeiC's website.

To a large extent, the research network seeks to anchor these service goals in its agreements with subcontractors. How this works is outlined here:

NORDUnet provides the international connections and represents the research network in the European research network collaboration GÉANT. Here, the research network has a collective SLA similar to the SLA the research network has with its users.

Agreements for subcontractors to the research network are essentially handled by DeiC, which in turn has an SLA with each of these subcontractors. However, it should be noted that it is not always the case that the levels in these SLAs are the same as in the SLA the research network has with the affiliated institutions. There is nothing unusual about this - it just means that in some cases DeiC has a responsibility that is theirs alone.

In many supplier contracts, it is customary that if operational goals are not met, this translates into a penalty for the supplier. The purpose of such a penalty is usually not so much to obtain the right to a specific reduction in the price, but much more to ensure that the customer, through the dialog about the compensation and payment, ensures that the supplier's management is involved in the matter.

The payment model for the research network does not contain a penalty concept, but every violation of the operational goals is reported to the board of DeiC, along with a statement of facts and corrective actions. This ensures that management addresses the issue.

Affiliated parties can always contact DeiC for further explanation and insight into corrective actions to the extent that this is not included in the operational notices issued.

At the Research Network steering committee meeting on March 6, 2009, it was decided that the Research Network must have an SLA and that its detailed content is determined by the daily management of DeiC.

If you want changes to the Research Network SLA, these must be sent to DeiC, which will then process them.