The new CloudEthernet Forum (CEF), which was formed earlier this year to address the specific issues of scaling and applying suitable Ethernet services for delivering cloud services, announced key appointments, goals and technical objectives for its first year.
James Walker, President of the CloudEthernet Forum and VP Network Services at Tata Communications, said the nascent cloud market would benefit if the industry comes together to collectively develop solutions that address technical challenges such as VLAN scaling, layer 2 performance and resilience across very large domains and between service providers. The goal is to meet the needs of cloud service users through the effective use of Ethernet.
The CEF's first task for its technical committee will be to complete, by the end of September, an initial White Paper outlining the key issues to be addressed, including:
- Cloud types
- Deterministic traffic performance
- End-to-end provisioning
- Overlay tunnels
- Provisioning resources
Leadership appointments include:
Jeffrey Schmitz, Chief Marketing Officer, Spirent Communications plc is appointed Chairman.
Two technical co-chairs have been appointed – Sam Youn, Director Network Architecture, Equinix and Mike Bencheck, Verizon Fellow – plus two marketing co-chairs to direct the Forum’s outreach and education strategy: Henry Bohannon, Senior Director, Head of Ethernet Product Management, Tata Communications and Doug Wills, Senior Director, Product Marketing & Management, Juniper Networks.
Eleven founding members – Alcatel-Lucent, Avaya, Citrix, Equinix, HP, Huawei, Juniper, PCCW Global, Spirent, Tata Communications and Verizon – have already been joined by Ciena, Coresite, Cyan, Ericsson and Telx.
The CEF’s forthcoming activities will include regional meetings for EMEA (Nice, France, September 25th) and APAC (Singapore, November 19th) as well as CEF activities at relevant industry events. The next members quarterly meeting will be held in Seattle, USA on October 24th.
The CloudEthernet Forum will operate as part of the MEF legal entity using the same bylaws and IPR.
http://www.cloudethernet.org/
