CCDE [7:125824]
This is the first I’ve heard of the CCDE, but I might note that presentations skills of various sorts are critical. Nortel’s architect certification didn’t call for oral presentations, but, after you’ve established background skills, you next have to write up five reasonably complex networks you designed, explaining why choices were made. The final is an open-book exam where you design a network given to you by the board, and sent back to them with your assumptions and rationale.
Long ago, I got tired of the CLI rather than the reasons for it. It’s been my very real-world experience to have to present designs with thousands (or more) of routers. Sometimes, this was a group effort where I was called back after giving an onsite CID. On other occasions, it was pure consulting, or subcontracting as the designer for a service provider’s proposal.
Before AT&T split into three pieces, I did one of those group exercises. They had 13 corporate divisions to put together as an internal corporate network, which was separate from the telephony operations support systems.
Some divisions (e.g., consumer products) had very little in-house networking experience, and had a relatively simple, not always optimal, network. At the other end of the spectrum, Bell Labs was one of the divisions.
This was quite a few years ago, but, IIRC, there were about 5000 routers, many of which were branch offices. The departments ran a mixture of RIP, IGRP, and OSPF, and there were both Cisco and non-Cisco routers. It was nice to have a client that physically owned the transmission facilities. This was long enough ago that the core was mostly T3 on optical, with Internet access (other than for special groups like Bell Labs) from the core. While the core was initially OSPF, the growth plan (again before the corporate split) was to have a core-of-cores using BGP, both for complex inter-divisional policies and for access to the Internet.
As I say, one example and a fairly old one. The requirements were actually much simpler than other enterprises I’ve done, such as a worldwide shipping company that had both IP and SNA on their network, with very complex failover policies and ISPs on several continents.
I’d like to know more about CCDE.
—–Original Message—– From: nobody@groupstudy.com [mailto:nobody@groupstudy.com] Sent: Friday, August 31, 2007 12:29 PM To: cisco@groupstudy.com Subject: RE: CCDE [7:125824]
Well that’s all very interesting Steve! LOL, I guess now I have to begin to question whether or not I should believe everything I read on the Internet!
>From what I’ve read (back to that already), this thing is the beast of all beasts. On one level, it will devalue the CCIE (now there will be “non-CCDEs need not apply” job reqs, leaving out even CCIEs). On the other, you can’t expect expert-level folk to keep their hands on the CLI their whole lives, so there’s got to be some updward direction to go. Also, as a design guy, I like the idea of having an expert-level design track.
The practical sounds almost ridiculous, but I guess it has to be. From what I’ve read, you have to present and defend a design totaling “thousands of nodes” before an interactive board. So public presentation skills will evidently be a must! Or so I’ve read on the Internet…
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Category: CCIE Study
