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.)
