CHICAGO -- The Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) held a special awards ceremony at GlobalComm, Chicago, today to celebrate the first group of systems and services to comply with MEF 14 - Abstract Test Suite for Traffic Management. This MEF Certification ensures conformance to the MEF Quality of Service attributes – a requirement of SLAs (Service Level Agreements) supporting simultaneous real-time and data intensive business applications. The certificates were presented by Nan Chen, the president of the Metro Ethernet Forum, and Bob Mandeville, president and founder of Iometrix, the company responsible for the conformance testing.
”Quality of Service is a critical attribute to ensure that Carrier Ethernet services will deliver the strict performance and bandwidth guarantees our business customers demand” says Michael Tighe, Director of Corporate Strategy of Verizon, and chair of the MEF board, “These 14 vendors are to be congratulated for being the first to commit to premium Carrier Ethernet services, and the challenge of submitting their products to two months of exhaustive testing at the Iometrix labs.”
Bob Mandeville agrees: ”The Test Plan for Traffic Management developed by Iometrix includes no less than 183 test cases covering EPL, EVPL and E-LAN services and engaging complex policing algorithms applied to the UNI, the EVC and Classes of Service within the EVC. These vendors, in committing to MEF14, have made a major step towards true interoperability of the mechanisms providing service quality of Carrier Ethernet Services. ”.
MEF 14 is a major step towards making Ethernet truly carrier-class. It is unique in that it provides clear specifications-based guidelines for the formulation of SLAs. MEF 14 complements MEF 9 and covers two sets of MEF Service Attributes, namely “Service Performance” and “Bandwidth Profiles”. The first set comprises three Service Performance attributes relating to the Ethernet Virtual Circuits (EVC): Frame delay, Frame delay variation and frame loss ratio. The second set, relating to the User Network Interface (UNI) and following the familiar example of Frame Relay, include four Bandwidth Profile attributes: CIR (Committed Information Rate), CBS (Committed Burst Size), EIR (Excess Information Rate), EBS (Excess Burst Size). Together MEF 9 and MEF 14 cover the complete set of Carrier Ethernet Service Attributes defined in the core definitional technical document MEF 10.
“Now Carrier Ethernet is delivering its promises on Quality of Service in a standardized, independently verified manner,” explains Mark Whalley, co-chair of the MEF Marketing Committee, “For a Service Provider end-customer, MEF 14 certification means confidence that the equipment in the network is capable of providing tightly specified SLA behaviour in terms of assured bandwidth and application responsiveness. With the explosion in VoIP usage and the promise of IPTV and other bandwidth hungry and delay- sensitive services, Carrier Ethernet must deliver Quality of Service to maintain its momentum as one of the fastest growing sectors in our industry.”
MEF