D2.2.3: Service Level Agreements
Creators: name: Delimoges, Arnaud
name: Moussier, Pascal
name: Bela Dias, Ana
name: Merida, Carlos
name: Bernardi, Sergio
name: Prangov, Georgi
name: Kwiecien, Agnieszka
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2011
Subjects: Deliverable
HPC
Research infrastructure

description: Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are of fundamental value for all organisations that provide services to users. SLAs record a common understanding about services, priorities, responsibilities, guarantees, and warranties of the services provided. This is very important not only for the organisations but also for the users to allow them to know the type of services (level of service) they can expect from the provider and which are the conditions for provision of these services, i.e. availability, serviceability, performance, operation, or any other characteristics of the service.<br> Within the PRACE AISBL context the main aim is establishing a service-oriented utility infrastructure for users that allows on demand provisioning and delivery of access services in a flexible way so that SLAs can serve as key enabler to support users management across different perspectives and domains between research and industry.<br> The SLAs definition methodology follows the well-established industry standard in the field of information technology management where there are several sets of best practices and standards which allow organisations to better understand, design and maintain the processes necessary for providing IT services. Some of the most important ones are the ISO/IEC 20000 International Service Management Standard. This standard supports several IT service management approaches, including the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), the Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) and components of Control Objectives for Information and related Technology (COBIT).<br> Further analysis of the results obtained in the PRACE projects and the best practices described in the above documents for the specific case of PRACE AISBL, taking into account its mission of providing high-end computing resources to European researchers from academic institutions and from industry, resulted in the definition of a Service Catalogue for PRACE AISBL and the need to produce two types of service level agreements: Operational Level Agreement (OLA) covering a service level agreement between each computer centre that contributes resources to PRACE AISBL and PRACE AISBL, called Contributors Agreement. This OLA should be common to all computer centres and cover the services defined in the PRACE Service Catalogue. User Agreement between each computer centre of the Hosting Members (HMs) contributing resources to PRACE AISBL and the users. This agreement should describe the standard average level of service the users may expect from the computer centres as well as the duties and responsibilities of the users for using the PRACE AISBL resources. The next step is to take into account the following specific characteristics of the PRACE AISBL organisation for deciding on the terms of reference of these agreements: implications of the organisation model of PRACE AISBL; identification of the main stakeholders; experience of the members of PRACE AISBL in their own countries with special attention being given to similar SLAs applied in the countries of the HMs; implications of the geographic distribution of PRACE AISBL resources. The main result of these efforts is a proposal illustrating the main elements to be considered or adapted for drafting the Contributors Agreement and the User Agreement. These proposals can serve as a reference framework to be used by PRACE AISBL to produce the actual versions of these agreements.