MEF awards first ‘carrier Ethernet’ gear certificates

The Metro Ethernet Forum announced its first certified products today at the Metro Ethernet World Congress in Berlin, identifying 16 vendors whose 39 products successfully passed lab tests of their compliance to the carrier Ethernet specifications created by the MEF.

The list of vendors included Actelis Networks, Alcatel, Atrica, Cisco Systems, Extreme Networks, Fujitsu Network Communications, Hatteras Networks, Lucent Technologies, Metrobility, MRV Communications, Nortel Networks, Riverstone Networks, Siemens, Tellabs, TPac and Worldwide Packets.

The MEF hopes the certifications will promote interoperability among different vendors' equipment and allow carriers to cut down on the amount of time they spend testing such gear.

The MEF announced its certification process in April, in which third-party labs test equipment for compliance to MEF's definition of "carrier Ethernet," which includes traffic protection, quality of service, TDM support, service management and scalability. Those five attributes are expressed in 22 specifications, nineteen of which were developed by the MEF, two of which are existing IEEE standards (802.1 and 802.1 ITU) and one of which is an existing IETF specification (for MPLS fast reroute).

The first batch of vendors named today were certified for compliance to MEF 9, which tests the scalability of the services each product delivers. Tests were defined for three different types of services: Ethernet private line (EPL) services, Ethernet virtual private line (EVPL) services and E-LAN (or multipoint) services.

The first MEF-authorized third-party tester, Iometrix, conducted the lab tests, subjecting each product to 262 test cases: 48 for EPL services, of which 33 were mandatory; 95 for EVPL, of which 63 were mandatory and 101 for E-LAN, of which 67 were mandatory.

"The tests that we run [for MEF 9] are defined across the [user network interface] and from the subscriber's point of view," said Bob Mandeville, president of Iometrix, in a conference call today. "Services are defined at the UNI from the subscriber's point of view, the UNI being the demarcation point between the subscriber's area of responsibility and the service provider's."

"It's by no means a rubber stamp," said Eric Puetz, executive director of SBC and co-chair of the MEF Certification Committee that authorized Iometrix as a tester.

One of the areas vendors had particular difficulty with, Puetz said, was in preserving customer virtual LAN identifications, especially with regard to VLANs reserved for priority traffic. "What becomes of the VLAN tag as it comes into the service provider across the UNI?" he said. "Do you strip it all together? Does it change?"

"The rules for transmitting priority frames are restrictive," he said. "The MEF has to respect the behavior of those frames as defined by IEEE. So you end up with a fairly complicated table of variations in the way that you tag frames that come into the egress. A number of vendors had to do a considerable amount of work to make sure they complied to the service definitions."

Next the MEF will conduct certification tests for compliance with its traffic management specifications. "Very loosely speaking--very loosely speaking--traffic management means QOS," Mandeville said. "But again, very loosely speaking."

The MEF's exclusive contract with Iometrix expires Oct. 31, after which the organization expects to expand the certification process with other testing labs.