Case Study submitted by Carolyn Duffy Marsan of Network World
cmarsan@nww.com

When it comes to service-level agreements, Internap Network Services adheres to the idea that the best defense is a good offense. That's why this provider of high-performance managed Internet services has designed its SLAs to be proactive when it comes to network outages and credits.

"The SLA is ours to administer," explains Kelly Flynn, program manager for service-level management and product development at Internap. "It should be our responsibility to catch our outages, not the customer's responsibility. We will diagnose and fix problems proactively. We also offer proactive crediting."

Flynn says that seven out of 10 business customers don't realize a network outage worthy of a credit has occurred until the credit shows up on their monthly bills.

"Only 10% of the customers that qualify for a credit ever get around to requesting it," she says. "100% of our customers that are owed credits get credits. And they get the credits in the next billing cycle."

We're taking a look at Internap's SLAs as part of an ongoing series on the SLAs offered by top-tier ISPs. Both AT&T and MCI recently enhanced their SLAs by committing to more aggressive IP performance metrics. In addition to covering those announcements, we've also analyzed the SLAs offered by Equant, Infonet and Sprint.

SLAs are a key differentiator for Internap, which sells premier Internet services routed across multiple carrier backbones.

Because of its built-in redundancy, Internap can offer aggressive performance guarantees, including 100% availability, 0.3% packet loss and 45 milliseconds of latency.

"We offer 100% availability border to border, from where a customer intersects our network to where the customer's traffic leaves our network," Flynn says.

In May, Internap enhanced its SLAs by adding a guarantee of less than 0.5 milliseconds of jitter, which is a key measurement for VoIP applications. Internap also added a guarantee that it would respond to denial-of-service attacks within 10 minutes of a customer's request.

Another new feature of Internap's SLAs is what it calls a "Reason for Outage" guarantee.

"If we can't provide customers with a reason for an outage - a detailed write-up of what happened within five business days of their request - then we'll give them a credit of one day for every day we are late," Flynn says. "This applies to any outage lasting any length of time."

Flynn says Internap's Reason for Outage report provides technical details about an outage, what steps Internap took to fix the outage, and gives advice on how to prevent such an outage in the future.

Internap prides itself on its generous SLA credits, which include a two-day credit for any outage lasting more than 10 minutes.

"We have a unique doubler in our SLA," Flynn says. "If we have a second outage in the same month, we double the credit that month. We make sure that we feel the pain, too."

Flynn says Internap offers a unique termination clause that allows customers to cancel their contract with Internap and suffer no termination fee if the customer experiences four outages within a month.

Internap's SLA applies to its IP, DNS and collocation services.

Ultimately, Internap's goal is to provide its customers with predictability for IP services.

"We try to make our SLAs very, very realistic of what our service is going to look like on a day-to-day basis,"Flynn says.

Flynn, who chairs a committee on SLA standards for the TeleManagement Forum, says she tries to create SLAs that are easy for enterprises to administer.

"If I give an SLA to a customer that they can't administer, that they can't implement, that they can't build a business around, it's not useful," she says. "We try to hit the customers' points of pain and write and SLA around that."

To contact: Carolyn Duffy Marsan
Carolyn Duffy Marsan is a senior editor with Network World and covers emerging Internet technologies and standards. Reach her at cmarsan@nww.com