A few weeks ago, I announced a small contest for anyone willing to give a suggested alternative to some of my CCNP lab suggestions. After countless analysis, considering, and a few coin flips, I've chosen a winner. More interesting to most of you though will be why I chose the winner, so let me ramble about that for today's blog.
In my posting for a $1200 CCNP lab, I had posted the following build list:
$1200 Lab 1: Switch-centric
3 X 2950 w/ standard Image $450
2 X 1710 $160
3 X 2610 $375
Miscellaneous reserve $150
Total: $1135
Almondu, our winner, posted a couple of alternatives, and I picked Almondu for this alternative suggestion: lose the 3 2610's and add 2 3640's, increasing the cost by $25. It's a small change, but a good one. The reason? The 3640's give you a little more feature support than do the 2610's, which is important in a router-centric CCNP cert. It gives you MPLS PE support in particular. You can still get some interesting redundancy with 4 routers, although only 2 have serial links (that's the only notable downside to the change.) All in all, if I was posting my original suggestion again, I'd go with Almondu's instead of mine - so there's our winner! The final lab looks like this:
$1200 Lab 1: Switch-centric (Winner)!
3 X 2950 w/ standard Image $450
2 X 1710 $160
2 X 3640 $400
Miscellaneous reserve $150
Total: $1160
(Almondu, I'll be in touch about the prize.)
Odom, CCIE No, 1624, splits time between writing books for Cisco Press and teaching classes for Skyline ATS. In his 25-ish years in the networking industry, he has worked as as a pre-sale and post-sale SE for a few networking vendors, as well as a network engineer implementing network technology. Wendell has spent the majority of the last 15 years teaching, consulting, and writing about networking technologies, most of which in some way relate to Cisco products. His books include titles on QoS, CCIE R/S, as well as several titles related to CCNA certification, including the September 2007 book CCNA Official Exam Certification Library (CCNA Exam 640-802) (Read a sneak peek of chapter 7). Click for the list of current titles by Wendell.
The opinions expressed in this Weblog are those of the writer and may not represent the opinions of Network World.
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Almondu, our winner, posted
Almondu, our winner, posted a couple of alternatives, and I picked Almondu for this alternative suggestion: lose the 3 2610's and add 2 3640's, increasing the cost by $25. It's a small change, but a good one.
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