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Service Level Agreement - Liberal Arts ITS

Overview

Liberal Arts ITS provides a variety of server-based services to the College of Liberal Arts faculty, staff, and students. The following document itemizes the levels of service that users of our technical services should expect. Both general and service-specific service level agreements are indicated.

Note that this service level agreement is applicable to server-based services only.

Service Level Agreement (SLA)

Terms of Use

  • AUP - Users must comply with the UT Austin [http://www.utexas.edu/vp/it/policies/aup/ Acceptable Use Policy].
  • Category I Data - Unless specifically indicated, our services have not been certified for the storage or serving of [http://www.utexas.edu/its/policies/opsmanual/cat-1data.php Category I] data. If you have the need to store or serve Category I data, please consult with the system administration staff.
  • Account Security - You are responsible for maintaining the security of your account and account credentials (username / password).

Service Availability

  • System Uptime - Users of our systems should expect the following uptime for our services.
    • file services - 99.9% (9 hours of downtime/year)
    • web services - 99.9% (9 hours of downtime/year)
    • media services - 99.5% (26 hours downtime/year)
    • statistical and statistical cluster services - 99.5% (26 hours downtime/year)
  • Normal Services Availability - Systems are available 24x7, with consideration for planned and unplanned system maintenance.
  • System Maintenance - System maintenance is typically scheduled for periods when there are minimal or no classes in session. This is typically over the winter break, and between the spring and first summer sessions. In most cases, these system maintenance windows will be performed outside of regular business hours (before 8 am and after 5 pm).
  • System Monitoring - All systems are monitored 24x7. Issues with systems deemed critical are addressed immediately by an on-call system administrator.
  • Outage Notification - users are notified at least 3 days ahead of time for a planned system outage or maintenance window by an email list. In certain situations we may go ahead with an outage with minimal (same-day) notification, if it is a critical security vulnerability.
  • Access Ban - In order to minimize the threat of brute force password attacks, after three failed login attempts to our servers, we will block all traffic from the originating IP address for a 5 minute period. After three further failed login attempts, the IP address will be banned for 24 hours. If this is due to unintentional error, please contact the system administration staff to remove the access ban.

Technical Support

  • Support Team and Service Hours - Support is provided by a team of four system administrators during regular support hours, Monday - Friday, 8:00 am - 6:00 pm.
  • Support Request - All support requests should be made via email to laits-help@utexas.edu. Please ensure that you have a server-related issue and not a desktop issue, which should be routed to laits-help@utexas.edu.
  • Response Time - We will make initial reply to a support request within 4 business hours.

System Backups

  • [#619]
  • MySQL Databases - We make nightly dumps of all mysql databases on the system, which are then backed up by our backup system.

Service Specific SLAs

File Services

  • Intended Usage - This system is intended to be used for web and application developers, and for the storage of incidental files as part of those projects. It is not intended for backing up whole computer images, incremental backups (such as with Retrospect), or for the permanent archiving of large files. Please use an alternate storage location for these types of archival backups.
  • Content - Do not use your file allocation for storage of any content for which you do not have the legal right to use, specifically audio-visual content such as mp3s, mpegs, movs, etc.
  • Quotas and Audits - At present, we do not have quotas on our file system. However, we do regularly review our file system to identify users who are using excessive storage. We reserve the right to audit your file usage, and request removal of any data that violates the above policies.

File Naming Policies

When placing your files on our servers, we ask that you adhere to a simple set of guidelines in terms of naming files. Following these guidelines will insure interoperability between Windows, Macintosh and Linux users. It will also allow us to guarantee that our server backup software will be able to properly backup and restore your files in the event of an emergency. The naming rules are as follows: * The only acceptable characters for file names are A thru Z, a thru z, 0 thru 9, dashes, underscores, and periods. * Accented or otherwise modified versions of the characters above are not permissible. * Please use file extensions when naming your files. Using file extensions will ensure that your files will behave as you expect them to, and that they'll be available for usage on other operating systems.

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