MEF's final draft SD-WAN service standard is publicly available
MEF announced the public availability of their final draft standard that, for the first time in the industry, defines an SD-WAN service and its various attributes.
After incorporating extensive feedback from service provider and technology members, MEF is moving the draft SD-WAN Service Attributes and Services standard (MEF 70) through the last phase of membership and Board approval.
"MEF's team of SD-WAN experts has worked overtime to develop a robust and timely industry standard following multiple rounds of in-depth peer review," said MEF CTO Pascal Menezes.
"We will officially publish MEF's SD-WAN service standard by mid-July 2019, but we are making the final draft publicly available now because broad industry alignment on common terminology will be healthy for market growth.
MEF's SD-WAN service definition standard describes requirements for an application-aware, over-the-top WAN connectivity service that uses policies to determine how application flows are directed over multiple underlay networks irrespective of the underlay technologies or service providers who deliver them.
Standardisation will enable a wide range of ecosystem stakeholders to use the same terminology when buying, selling, assessing, deploying, and delivering SD-WAN services.
The SD-WAN service definition is a foundational step for accelerating sales, market adoption, and certification of MEF 3.0 SD-WAN services orchestrated across a global ecosystem of service provider networks.
Next Steps for SD-WAN Service Standardisation
MEF already has begun work on the next phase of SD-WAN standardisation (MEF 70.1), which covers more complex service attributes related to application business importance and prioritisation, underlay network characteristics, and connectivity to private/public cloud services consistent with market priorities for SD-WAN services.
MEF also is progressing standards work focused on LSO APIs, application security, and intent-based networking for SD-WAN services.
Fujitsu Network Communications head of SD-WAN services Ralph Santitoro says, "SD-WAN services are transformative and have raised the expectations for network services.
"They enable subscribers to focus on application performance and visibility and apply policies to regulate compliance based on business importance and security.
"SD-WAN services also facilitate and accelerate an enterprise's multi-cloud digital transformation. The MEF 70 standard is the commencement of several MEF SD-WAN projects that I anticipate will simplify operations and accelerate the time to sell, deploy and support SD-WAN services.
