MEF Will Advance Automation & More

The MEF today is touting progress on enabling automated orchestration of a range of services, including multi-vendor SD-WAN, across different service provider networks for faster implementation of end-to-end services. (See MEF Announces Progress on Multi-Vendor SD-WAN and MEF Advances Multi-Carrier Service Orchestration.)

In a broad update of its MEF 3.0 effort, MEF and its member companies say there's significant progress on the SD-WAN front, including an implementation project involving four vendors, as well as on Carrier Ethernet, IP services and optical services. All of this is part of MEF's standardization efforts to make services "orchestration-ready" or rapidly deployable, using its Lifecycle Services Orchestration initiative and both existing and newly developed application programming interfaces.

In some cases -- as with IP services and Layer 1 optical services -- what MEF is doing is bringing new levels of specificity to services that have existed for some time, says MEF CTO Pascal Menezes. With IP services, for example, "we are actually defining the language of IP so you can get to APIs for orchestrating IP and we can all agree on what those IP services look like -- all those things have never been specified. So now they are specified in a 200-page document that you can now build services around."

Announcing progress at this point is intended to show this MEF 3.0 standardization work, announced last November at MEF 17, "is real, it's not pie-in-the-sky, it has teeth and traction, and, in some cases, is coming to fruition," he told Light Reading.

The SD-WAN implementation project's first phase, which involves three SD-WAN vendors -- Nokia Corp. (NYSE: NOK)/Nuage, VeloCloud Networks Inc. (now part of VMware Inc. (NYSE: VMW)) and Riverbed Technology Inc. (Nasdaq: RVBD) -- as well as orchestration software vendor Amartus , is one of the more tangible efforts. Each vendor is implementing an SD-WAN on its own gear and then connecting through a central gateway to the other vendors. All three SD-WANs are then orchestrated using an LSO-based orchestrator which makes use of the LSO Presto Network Resource Provisioning API to enable a single service to be created spanning multiple vendor gear.

This is an edited version of a story that was originally published on Telco Transformation's sister site, Light Reading. To see the full story, click here.