Support Agreement and Associated Response Time

Logistics time—the time it takes for your service provider to respond—can have a major impact on a system outage [VargasOL00]. Logistics time on a system has these effects:

• Significant impact on the outage time caused by a single point of failure (SPOF)

• Minimal impact on the outage time caused by additional system failures that occur within the same downtime period

• No impact on outage time caused by system interruptions triggered by automatic system recovery (ASR)

• No impact on outage time caused by maintenance-related events

A service contract is a key element of system availability because it defines the maximum possible time it takes the service organization to assume ownership of a problem. You must understand the service options available in your geographic area to ensure that you select the appropriate service option to meet your business availability requirements. For mission-critical systems, assign a local person to be the central point for gathering information (in both directions).

System availability can be enhanced by being aware of the problem escalation process, which ensures that new bugs and problems are handled appropriately by the service organization. Whenever you discover a problem with product functionality, file a request for enhancement (RFE) document with the service organization to initiate a review process.