The world of technology moves at a rapid pace. Once you learn one thing, you can expect that knowledge to be obsolete in a couple of years. The only fields that probably compete with technology in how fast they change is probably being a scientist or maybe even a doctor. If you are a professional in the tech field, it is your job to be on top of new and up coming technologies. This is not to say that you must master everyone of them, but you should at the very least be aware that they are out there. The first time you stop attempting to gain new knowledge in your chosen field, is when you start to become obsolete. The people behind Cisco Certifications reinforce these ideals. Their certifications are only valid for three years. After that you have to be re certified.

When a company decides to back something, they are putting their good name at risk. This is the same when it comes to certifications. The company is basically backing you with their reputation. If you walk around with a badge, advertising that you are Cisco Certified, they want to make sure that you know your stuff. Getting a certification ten years ago and never retaking the test, doesn’t show that you are knowledgeable about the latest technology. If you go to a potential employer and you know nothing about the questions that they are asking you, this makes them have a dim view of the certification itself. A bad reputation then makes the certification useless. Certifications are mostly about impressing the employer, in addition to getting the tech knowledge. If you are not able to do that, then it is worthless.

Some people will complain about too many new trends in technology and not all of them will last. Of course most of them will not last, but that is not the point. You should have known going in that technology is an ever changing field. This is not an unknown fact. It will not stop, just because you wish it to. The field is all about growth and taking ideas to the next level.

Cisco truly cares about their certification process. So much so, that they have set their certifications up with levels. There are five different levels of certifications, they are Entry, Associate, Professional, Expert, and Architect. If you are able to keep up with their technology, you will be able to rise up in levels. Becoming re certified every three years is a perfect way to do this. In that three years span of time, you should have been able to gain a lot more knowledge in your chosen section, so that you would be able to rise a level or two. This takes a large amount of discipline and future employers will recognize that.

Achieving a Cisco Certification every three years will help weed out the people who are not willing to keep up with the latest technology. In the world of tech, it is your job to be able to keep up with the latest developments. If you do not, then you will only be qualified for taking care of older technology. This can help you earn a steady paycheck but not in the most exciting way.

When it comes to the world of certifications there are many to choose from. It doesn’t matter what area of expertise that you are going in, there will always be sub sections that you will have to know more than others. It is the same in technology. When a company hires you for a tech position, they want to know if you have a broad range of knowledge but also if you are a specialist in the field that they are hiring you for. The one way to show that you are a specialist is by getting a certification in that area. Besides an actual demonstration, there is no better way to prove that you can do what you say you can. The only problem is, what do you want to be your specialty?

When you sit down and decide to get a job in the tech field, you have to really think about what you like the best. Luckily, Cisco offers a wide range of technology that you can specialize in. Their certifications are considered top notch in the industry. Once you have one, there will be a lot of doors opened to you.

Some of the areas that Cisco offers a certification in includes, Data Center, Advanced Routing, Video, Network security, Voice, Wireless and a whole lot of others. There will be something in the group, that you will like more than the others. You have to look at yourself and figure out what you like the best. You will also have to weigh that decision with what employers are looking for in your area. If you are in a major tech hub, then you can most likely study any of these areas and find a job in it. But if you are in a smaller town, then you should really look at the local newspaper and see what the employers in the area are looking for. There is no need to waste time studying for a certification that employers are not hiring for in your area. That is, unless you are willing to move.

There are a lot of Cisco Certifications that are available for you to achieve. It all comes down to two major factors. What are you interested in? Also, what are the employers looking for in your area? If you are able to answer these two questions, then you will be on the road to getting the proper certification that fits best to your own situation.

I was browsing the Cisco support forum the other day and found the following question post which is about designing a Cisco switched network. Some useful answers are given, so I thought I would repost here for my blog readers. You will find useful tips about switch port dimensioning, redundancy etc. I Hope you find it useful.

Initial Post Question

Hello all,

I am relatively new to networking and am currently doing some theory work with network design to gain some knowledge. I’m sure you have all been there!!

I have a specification which details the needs for the network across a large campus, including number of users, their bandwidth usage, their locations, overall budget etc. I have chosen what servers are need and their locations, and the number of routers needed and their connectivity to each other to build in redundancy. My next step is to calculate how many switches will be needed for each building to get all the users onto the network and this is where I am getting quite confused.

My understanding is that a host connects to one port on the switch and a standard switch has generally around 24 ports. Therefore one switch can theoretically connect only 24 users to the network (perhaps 23 if one of those ports are used to connect to the router). My problem is that is some buildings I have over 400 users (Ive added a small percentage to allow for growth of the company). Does this mean that I need one switch to connect to the router and then another switch on each of the 24 ports to have enough ports to connect this many users? If this or something similar is true how is redundancy built in because if the switch that connects to the router goes down all the users in that building lose their connection. This seems a very expensive solution and probably quite an ugly one.

If anybody could guide me through a solution it would be very much appreciated. I have spent a long time reading articles and such on the internet but nowhere seems to go though this so if you know of a resource that walks you through design a medium/large network that would be great.

Many thanks in advance
Darren

Reply 1

Hi Darren,

To answer a couple of your points, you can get access switches with 48 ports (Cisco 2960 or 3560 for example).
If you have 400 users in a building, will all 400 user locations be cabled back to a single network cabinet (closet)?
If they are then you may be better off looking at a chassis based switch such as the 4500 series for example.
If not, you might want to to distribute the access switches in different cabinets around the building and link them back to a central distribution switch or router.
The final design will depend on the physical size of the building because don’t forget that you are restricted to 100 meters of UTP cabling between the user outlet port and the switch.

Hope that gives you some pointers.

Pete

Reply 2

Hi Darren,

To have redundancy in network you should have redundant pair of devices in your network to support redundancy and to support 400 users you can have chassis based switches with ethernet modules to support more number of users.

with you setup redundancy will be the main question as one router and local lan so the switch which is connected to router goes down then network outage.

The better way is to have dual router and dual switch in bundling mode and connect a cris cross cable between router and switch to have full redundancy in your network.In this fashion you can achive full redundancy and no network outage if any one of the device goes down.

Hope that helps out your query !!

Regards

Ganesh.H

Reply 3

Hello Darren,

IMHO the design is mainly dependent on how the connectivity and the requirements per floor( if any). If there is a per floor cabinet then may be you can use C3750 stack for access layer solution per floor.To increase any capacity needs you just keep adding to the stacks. Then if there is fiber wiring between floors available you can chose to interconnect access layer and distribution using that. Say one closet/cabinet on any floor as the collapsed distribution model, the choice is vast here c3750/4500/6503. The access layer c3750 do come with 48 ports and 4 SFP based uplink ports. so you can use the sfp based uplink ports to connected these back to your collapsed distribution layer, which becomes your default gateway and may be the STP root port too. Now for redundancy, IMHO the access layer needs to be dual connected to a redundant gateway model (each acccess stack connected to both gateways) as Ganesh suggested earlier. You can either use HSRP/VRRP to provide L3 gateway redundancy. You can also use etherchannel for uplinks to provide more redundancy. Of course if one switch fails in the stack then we loose those ports, but still the other switches on the stack will work. this is just my thoughts on you requirements.

Hope that helps.

Deesh

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