The draft was developed by incorporating extensive feedback from service provider and technology members and MEF is now 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 Pascal Menezes (pictured), CTO, MEF. “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.”
Described within the draft document is 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 regardless of the underlay technologies or service providers who deliver them.
Through this type of standardisation, stakeholders can use the same technology when buying, selling, assessing, deploying and delivering SD-WAN services. Therefore, the definition of the SD-WAN service is a key step in accelerating sales, market adoption and certification of MEF 3.0 SD-WAN services across a global ecosystem of service provider networks.
In addition, MEF has already started work on the next phase of SD-WAN standardisation (MEF 70.1), which examines more complex service attributes related to application business prioritisation, underlay network characteristics and connectivity to private/public cloud services consistent with market priorities for SD-WAN services. MEF is also working on standards focused on LSO APIs, application security and intent-based networking for SD-WAN services.
The company is also on-track to launch its pilot MEF 3.0 SD-WAN service certification programme this year. This certification will test a set of service attributes and their behaviours defined in the SD-WAN standard and described in detail in the upcoming MEF 3.0 SD-WAN Service Certification Blueprint.
