MEF Publishes Two Standards, Launches SDN/NFV Certifications

MEF’s quest to standardize the next generation of network automation passed several new milestones this morning on the road to MEF 3.0. The organization has published two key standards and kicked off a new class of professional certification options.

On the standards front, MEF 59 and 60 are now complete. Both lie within the ‘Presto’ piece of the organization’s LSO Reference Architecture, enabling the orchestration of network resource provisioning over a mix of underlying network technologies. We’ve been seeing demos of this stuff over the last few quarters, but now that the standards are complete we can expect vendors and network operators to start rolling it out in the real world.  And the industry appears to be ready to run with it, we’ll just have to see where it is they run to.

Meanwhile, MEF has been working in collaboration with the Linux Foundation and ETSI on professional certification testing for SDN and NFV. Today they launched the beta version of the MEF-SDN/NFV certification program alongside the existing Carrier Ethernet and Network Foundations certifications. They hope to regularize the ecosystem around networks powered by all the new automation and virtualizations technologies we have been seeing, enabling those who have done the work to keep up to stand out in the workforce.

When I first heard about the MEF’s plans to extend its reach beyond the Ethernet world and into the broader LSO realm, I actually didn’t think they’d be able to make this much progress on so many fronts in just a few years.  But a lot of organizations, whether large or small, vendor or carrier, have put some serious effort into making it happen.

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Categories: Ethernet · NFV · SDN