24 Introduction to the New Mainframe: Large-Scale Commercial Computing
2.6 Service level agreement
A service level agreement (SLA) is an agreement between a service provider
and a recipient, generally the server owner and a business unit. There should be
several SLAs in place to cover the various aspects of the business that will be
run on the server. For capacity management, having correct and precise
definitions of SLAs is very important, because these SLAs are the baseline
against which the capacity demands are measured and compared.
For example, an Internet application may have an SLA that defines the maximum
allowable response time for an online transaction, and one that defines the time
at which daily trading reports have to be available ...