The economy stinks, but there are pockets of good news. Even today, I was doing the usual ritual at lunch – ham sandwich, Cheetohs, and channel surfing the news shows. The newsies were going over the bright spots in this economy – retailers known for lw prices, auto part stores (because few people are buying new cars), and they even mentioned the up-tick of people selling on auction sites to earn some extra cash.
Which brings me to the beginning of a new topic – CCNA and CCNP lab gear. In the last year or so, I’ve done two series of blog posts on lab gear for these two popular Cisco certs – one for CCNA, and the other for CCNP. In fact, even months later, those blog posts still get a regular stream of hits. And, the exams haven’t changed since then either. So… why look at it again? Cost. Without the economic drag, the older router or switch models become, the more likely they’re affordable for a home lab. With the economic downturn, and the number of people looking to pick up some cash on EBay, I’ve been wondering if 2009 is the year for people to build a CCNA or CCNP lab.
Here’s what I plan to do: examine the current cost of the router/switch models we ended up considering this time last year in the CCNP series, plus any new ones that look promising. Based on that, I’ll probably look again at what build lists make sense for each cert, depending on how much $$ you can spend.
And… here’s what I’m not going to do: I’m not going to repeat the analysis of what’s on the exams, and what IOS feature sets are required for those features. That shouldn’t have changed since the last go round. So, I’ll try and stay focused on models, prices, and what combinations you need to make it useful for CCNA and CCNP study.
To that end, I’ll start with a request to all of you. What have you bought lately that was a good deal? What models, what cards? And most importantly, is there something missing from my list of router models below? I want to identify all the models I need to look at up front, and then we’ll go from there. (No promises that I’ll get to all listed models, but I’ll try.)
Anyway, here’s a table of router models that we examined last go round, which is what I’ll work from for this series, plus others that look like they have potential. The table also lists the min memory for one of the couple of IOS feature sets we settled on last year as well, since that impacts the price of the gear enough to matter. Weigh in, let me know your thoughts, and I’ll get into the pricing some next week.
