MEF has announced the public availability of its final draft standard that defines an SD-WAN service and its various attributes. MEF is now moving the draft "SD-WAN Service Attributes and Services standard (MEF 70)" through the last phase of membership and board approval. The document is available at https://www.mef.net/Assets/Draft-Standards/MEF_70_Draft_(R1).pdf.
"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, 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."
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.
Standardization is intended to enable a range of stakeholders to use the same terminology when buying, selling, assessing, deploying, and delivering SD-WAN services.
MEF has begun work on the next phase of SD-WAN standardization (MEF 70.1), which covers more complex service attributes related to application business importance and prioritization, 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.
MEF remains on track to launch its pilot MEF 3.0 SD-WAN Service Certification program in 2019. The certification will test a set of service attributes and their behaviors defined in the SD-WAN standard and described in detail in the upcoming MEF 3.0 SD-WAN Service Certification Blueprint. The MEF-SDN/NFV Certified Professional (MEF-SDN/NFV) exam and related training programs incorporate general SD-WAN information.
SD-WAN will be a dominant topic in MEF 3.0 Proof of Concept Showcase demonstrations and conference sessions at MEF 19 in November in Los Angeles.