Reliability of Service Level Estimators in the Data Centre

The ability to predict achievable service levels is an important part of business strategy in drawing up service level agreements (SLA). Service delivery is a dialogue between supply and demand. Recently it has been argued that adaptive service levels might be predicted using classical queueing theory combined with a data centre model. Using generic tools, we investigate the accuracy with which service levels can be predicted for a single server Web service, based on expected traffic patterns, and hence we identify approximate limits on the reliability for service levels.