emerion ensures a high Service Level of reliability and availability (99.8% annual average of availability) through constant monitoring and maintenance of our systems, by advanced system engineers and careful selection of business partners.

This SLA covers:

1. Availability of the network
2. Speed - Round Trip Time (Latency)
3. Delivery (Packet Loss)
4. Availability of Server Services
5. Load Monitoring and No Overbooking
6. Maintenance

1. Availability of the network (> 99.8%)

The physical infrastructure of the network is made available by a state-of –the-art datacenter operated by one of the world´s leading backbone providers.

The location (in Vienna/Austria) and the equipment of the data center fit international standards. The facility is designed with raised floors, redundant temperature control systems, redundant circuits, backed up with dual UPS and dual diesel generators and redundant pre-action fire suppression systems using FM200 gas. The NOC (Network Operations Center) monitors the systems 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Only authorized staff has access through electronic keys.

The network has high-speed bandwidth performance to ensure full traffic availability during peak hours or unexpected spikes.

2. Speed – Round Trip Time (RTT), Latency (transmission delay)

Round trip time is a measure of the time it takes for a packet to travel from a computer, across a network to another computer, and back.

Destination	RTT (monthly average)
Vienna	0.06 milliseconds
Frankfurt	13.48 milliseconds
Amsterdam	20.84 milliseconds
London	35.41 milliseconds
Paris	23.32 milliseconds
New York	107.34 milliseconds

If transmission delay (Latency, based on the Round Trip Time) is detected by emerion, economically justifiable efforts are made to locate the source to restore the Service Level:

Latency between two routers in the European area of the network > 80 milliseconds
Latency between two routers in the continental US area of the network > 120 milliseconds
Latency between two routers in the network section between New York or Washington and London > 180 milliseconds

3. Delivery – Packet Loss (<1%)

Packet Drops may occur in case of unexpected traffic spikes or due to internet failures. In such cases the data packets are discarded and retransmitted, thus causing delays in the network traffic. Speed, one of the internet’s basic advantages, is thereby slowed down.

emerion monitors the totals of monthly packet loss (Excess Packet Loss) and makes economically justifiable efforts during an excess of 1% to locate the source and restore the Service Level.

Destination	Loss (monthly average)
Vienna	0.00%
Frankfurt	0.03%
Amsterdam	0.05%
London	0.06%
Paris	0.02%
New York	0.11%

4. Availability of Server Services (> 99.8%)

emerion operates all systems on own servers. To ensure permanent availability of the web sites hosted at emerion, a load-balanced server-cluster-system is used. Each server in the cluster has the same configuration and delivers the same content. The redundant load-balancers check the load of each server and incoming requests are forwarded to the server with the lowest load. If one server of the cluster is out of service, the traffic is automatically distributed to the remaining servers.

Our engineers can inspect the current status at any time due to our real-time monitoring, which enables continuous surveillance, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.

5. Load Monitoring and No Overbooking

emerion operates all services without overbooking or overload of neither of the machines. All servers are continuously checked for their load.

The servers are set up, maintained and updated with up-to-date software by engineers. The emerion servers are configured to ensure safe execution of customer’s software and programs, with possibly no affection of server load due to incorrect programming. If problems occur on machines, economically justifiable efforts are made by emerion to restore and ensure the Service Level.

6. Maintenance

Maintenance is necessasy to keep software up-to-date, for hardware upgrades and to ensure that the system is always up to the state-of-the-art technology. emerion technicians thoroughly test new software, new hardware and new configurations before it will public available. The innovations are implemented at the running system only after those tests passed successfully.

emerion does most of the maintenance without affecting the running system.

If maintenance is necessary, affecting availability of the customer’s services, it is done with maximum care at off-peak times during the late night or early morning hours (UTC). Such maintenance is always announced in advance. The customers can subscribe to maintenance announcements using the ControlPanel. The announcement includes exact maintainence time, information about the affected services and exact duration of service downtime.