This is also an
acronym for
Service Level Agreement. This is an
agreement between the
provider of a
service and the customer which defines the service in
measurable terms. Most often the service is defined in the amount of
time that it is available. Commonly referred to as "five nines" (for 99.999%, or "seven nines" for 99.99999%, which requires a maximum of
3 seconds of
downtime a year. There was a story about this at
slashdot.org at http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/08/27/1419238&mode=nested
SLAs have also been defined by the number of users who can connect at a time, performance benchmarks, dial up availability, and usage statistics. The agreement can be either a custom creation between the parties involved, or a pre-defined standard agreement.