Accelerating Industry Transformation and Winning an Award at MEF18
By Mark Showalter
Sr. Director, Corporate Communications
MEF18, produced by Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) and held from October 29 to November 2, 2018, was a busy and exciting event, with more than 1,000 attendees from over 275 companies converging in Los Angeles to focus on enabling agile, assured and orchestrated communications services for the digital economy.
The highlight of the event for Infinera was the MEF 2018 Awards Dinner Gala on October 31, at which we were honored to win the Multi-Vendor Innovation award for our joint end-to-end multi-layer Transport SDN solution with NEC/Netcracker. This solution leverages Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF) and MEF standards to enable programmable transport over a multi-vendor, multi-domain network infrastructure using Infinera’s Xceed Software Suite along with NEC/Netcracker’s Multilayer Transport SDN Controller. This is an extraordinary achievement for both companies, and we thank MEF for the honor.
This year’s event program built on the MEF 3.0 transformational global services framework, on which service providers, technology vendors, open source projects and standards organizations are collaborating to accelerate industry transformation. We were delighted to take part in this ongoing collaboration by partnering with our customer CenturyLink on two proofs of concept (PoCs) in MEF18’s fifth annual Proof of Concept Showcase.
Our first PoC, in the Multi-Layer Services category and titled MEF 3.0 Implementation for Orchestrated Multilayer Optical Transport, demonstrated the power of applying generic network abstraction concepts such as constraint, forwarding and termination to control, manage and orchestrate multi-technology, multi-layer, multi-vendor domains in a consistent manner. This PoC used a common application programming interface (API) to provision and control Layer 0 to 3 transport network resources in support of corresponding MEF 3.0 services, building on the recent joint Software-defined Networking (SDN) Transport API Interoperability Demonstration by MEF, OIF and the Open Networking Forum. In addition to CenturyLink, this PoC involved collaboration with Telus and Telefónica, and also featured seamless interworking with the Infinera Transcend SDN Transport Controller, a new addition to the Infinera solutions portfolio via our recent acquisition of Coriant.
Our second POC was in the Service Assurance category, titled Data Science Applications for Lifecycle Service Orchestration (LSO) Architecture-based Service Fulfillment and Assurance. For a deep dive into the technology behind this demonstration and to learn more about how it drives innovation in cognitive networking, stay tuned for a follow-up blog.
Infinera’s Transport SDN solutions bring the power of SDN to the transport layer, from long-haul and subsea to metro access, and are designed to scale bandwidth, accelerate service innovation and simplify optical network operations. Infinera’s Xceed Software Suite delivers an open, purpose-built, multi-layer SDN platform with revenue-ready applications, leveraging the scalability, flexibility and programmability of Infinera Intelligent Transport Networks.