MEF Takes On Booming SD-WAN Market with Help from Amartus and Vendors

The importance of branch offices is critical to companies that want to stay close to their customers. Many firms have set up complex branch office networks to give these remote locations access to data resources, but with the growing importance of cloud services and branch office Internet access the branch office is changing these networks. These dynamics are making the software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) market so hot.

SD-WAN brings added intelligence and network choices to the branch office, but its effectiveness is limited in multi-vendor SD-WAN implementations. That’s where the MEF gets involved.

MEF Announces Multi-Vendor SD-WAN Implementation Project

On May 31, MEF announced that several MEF SD-WAN vendor members have stepped up to develop the MEF 3.0 Multi-Vendor SD-WAN Implementation project to solve the rapidly growing problem of orchestrating services over multiple SD-WAN deployments that are based on different technology vendor products.

Those companies include Amartus in concert with  SD-WAN vendors Riverbed, Velocloud/VMware, Nuage Networks/Nokia, and others.

Why is Amartus a Part of This SD-WAN Project?

We have extensive multi-vendor network expertise that is added to the SD-WAN expertise of the other vendors.

The project will see each SD-WAN vendor implement an SD-WAN based on its own products on the MEFnet cloud implementation platform before then interconnecting them through a central gateway.

The key MEF technology that will be used to orchestrate this network is the newly standardized LSO Presto Network Resource Provisioning (NRP) API. Amartus co-leads the LSO Presto project and is an expert on its integration.

Read the Full MEF Press Release

More details are available in a press release on the MEF Website, but the importance of the project was summarized in the words of our Technical Architect, Marek Prochera, who has been involved in the project:

When we worked with Cisco and other industry contributors on the UNI Manager project to enable LSO Presto NRP API support in OpenDaylight, we quickly realized that this work would be useable for a wide range of technology domains, including SD-WANs.

For this reason, we joined this ground breaking MEF multi-vendor implementation project so that we can accelerate the LSO Presto initiative and remove the need for time-consuming, many-to-many interoperability testing between vendors.