The generic service level agreement has been a dietary staple for consumers of network service for years. But being generic is no longer sufficient for networks carrying mission-critical and time-sensitive payloads. The real-time demands of increasingly sophisticated users have caught up with SLAs. And SLAs are catching up with the network technology enterprises are increasingly turning to: Ethernet.

“We believe a real impediment to Ethernet taking off has been the lack of Ethernet SLAs,” said Fred Ellefson, vice president of Ethernet alliances for Adva Optical Networking. “Selling Ethernet as a cheap, dumb pipe doesn't meet a lot of enterprises' needs. They aren't going to run their mission-critical data over a best-effort service without an SLA.”

However, providing SLAs in an Ethernet environment has proved difficult because of a lack of demarcation at the enterprise, which would allow for passive performance monitoring.

Enter the Etherjack, which gives service providers an access point at an enterprise's edge router than allows for end-to-end quality of service. Adva has had Etherjack in its FSP 150 product line since launching it in 2004, and it recently launched its Etherjack Service Assurance (ESA) solution, which allows carriers to measure SLA performance on an end-to-end basis using SLA parameters recommended by the Metro Ethernet Forum.

However, Etherjack services merely provide the means to an SLA end. Correlating the data now collectable from all points of an enterprise network and presenting it in a way that is useful to carriers and their customers is the essential tool that makes the Ethernet SLA the driver it is.

Adva partnered with InfoVista in September to provide a joint solution that combined Adva's FSP 150 products with VistaInsight for Networks, InfoVista's metro Ethernet performance management solution, and gives carrier operations teams and end users visibility into the real-time performance of their Ethernet service.

“It's one thing to collect performance data and provide a simple tool for end users to look at, but it's quite another to provide all the ways to slice and dice the data that InfoVista allows,” Ellefson said.

It is visibility that allows carriers like Sprint to offer end-to-end SLAs for their global IP/MPLS customers, which is the same technology used by the majority of Adva customers.

Sprint launched its end-to-end SLA in April. Laura Anderson, MPLS and wireline services marketing manager for Sprint, said this made it the only provider offering standard end-to-end global SLAs, which measure performance from router to router on every link in a customer's network rather than provide regional performance averages. There is no additional premises equipment required, and they're free.

Providing these SLAs has changed the dynamics of the carrier/customer relationship, said Tony Jescovitch, brand manager for Sprint. “You use to hand customers a copy of your standard SLA with the network averages you adhered to, but now you talk about which sites go where, what bandwidth is required at each site and what affect the local loop has on things,” he said. “It's a much more technical discussion.”

Multinational SLAs make the network design more important, he added. “It's more challenging with every mile you go. As you travel around the world, getting under 300 milliseconds gets difficult sometimes.”