The CCIE Datacenter Plan

On the CCIE Data Center (or Centre, if you speak the Queen’s English) front:

The rumor had been that Cisco was going to announce a new CCIE Data Center track, possibly replacing the CCIE SAN track. That didn’t quite happen.

I took a look at the PDF (BRKCCIE-1001_c2_Rev_2.pdf) of the CCIE update presentation (you can take a look yourself for free by going to the  Cisco Live 2011 site). They gave quick overview of the CCIE tracks, an expanded intro to the CCIE SAN track, and mentioned that CCIE SAN will likely be updated in the future with data center subjects like ACE, WAAS, DC switching technologies (QoS, vPC), UCS, etc.

The most promising part of the presentation was the schedule from that presentation, which showed them referring to the CCIE DC/SAN.

Back, and to the left. Back, and to the left.

So a bit of a buzzkill. I was hoping they’d go full bore with a CCIE DC track. It seems it might not be out for a while, perhaps a year before its actually updated to be SAN/DC.  Tom Hollingsworth of Networking Nerds thinks it’s 12-18 months out.

So here’s my plan.  I’m going to finish up my CCNP (ROUTE and TSHOOT to go), and then go for the existing CCIE SAN. That’s probably going to take a year before I’m ready to take the lab. If the CCIE data center track isn’t announced by then, I’ll just take the lab.

They did announce a few details as to what they will likely add to the track:

* ACE
* WAAS
* Cisco UCS

Which is awesome, because I’ve been teaching and consulting with ACE for 3 years now, and teaching Cisco UCS for a year and a half. I got those down pat. About 3 years ago I got TTT (train-the-trainer) for Cisco WAAS, and I think I’m cert’d, but never ended up teaching it. I’m familiar with it, but it’d take some refamiliarization.

Eventually, I’d love to give bootcamps for CCIE DC (CCSI after all).