I have been working with a large media company over the past twelve months. I have been assisting in showing which parts of their business Symantec can help them better deliver their Service levels. The organization in question has a very large estate comprising like most of both virtual and physical and the normal split of Linux and Solaris. For their new applications Linux is the default building block. Solaris is used for the high performance compute as and when needed as an exception. They have 4 service levels ranging from 4 x 9999 to 1 x 9. I set about mapping our Business Continuity products to their SLA’s. For each of the SLA’s I needed to assume both a virtual and a physical solution and list our advantages over our competitors. I sometimes forget what a comprehensive portfolio we have because I am very familiar with it. But I was able to suggest solutions ranging from a one node cluster or application HA all the way up to Storage Foundation for Oracle RAC and campus clusters. I had to dig into to some of the requirements and understand that the SLA’s are guidance and typically these must be beaten.
On initial inspection I had thought there may be little we could offer until we got into the higher 9’s for criticality. But after discussing this with the teams even throughout the lower levels there was an appetite for automation for simplicity and standardization. I have had to remove the SLA table and replace the customer name, but the document is attached if anyone is interested.