#CiscoChampion

IT Certifications are Popular! Hiring Managers are looking at candidates who have experience on the current technology they are hiring for, as well as their certification credentials. This helps them get a better picture of their abilities. Being a certified technician or engineer answers a few ques…

I have been studying for my CCIE Security since late last year, with a short hiatus after Cisco Live due to health issues – more on that in a later post. When I saw that Natalie Timms – former manager for the CCIE Security exam program, was writing a book focused on practical labs for th…

Who’s more intelligent a rocket scientist or a lizard? Well it’s a matter of perspective. I’ll grant you that a lizard is less likely to design a spaceship capable of inter stellar flight, but if you put that same rocket scientist in the desert, I know who my money would be on to survive the longest…

Imagine that you see a Tweet today inviting you to apply for a part-time networking job, something you can do in addition to your normal job. You appear to be qualified for the job, and the work looks interesting as well. However, it requires enough of your time so that you would have to set aside y…

I don’t think that anyone can deny that being in the IT industry at this time is exciting and interesting. It’s also exhausting. There is a ton of hyperbole floating about on Twitter and the Blogosphere concerning the need for network engineers to become programmers, and that ‘whatever’ technology d…

When it comes to career development, time is a currency that must be spent wisely. I myself am a full-time dad, a full-time network engineer, and that leaves little time for personal endeavors. However we must still allocate time to develop our skillsets outside of work. Here are some tips for doing…

Since DMVPN has been added to the CCIE v5 BluePrint (http://www.cisco.com/web/learning/exams/docs/ccieRS_Lab5.pdf) I figured that now was just as good of a time as any to write this blog. DMVPN stands for Dynamic Multipoint VPN and it is an effective solution for dynamic secure overlay networks. DMV…

Recently I was speaking to someone (Mike from New Jersey) at Cisco Live and they were raving about their journey to the Flexpod. They were seeking the best compute, networking and storage yet didn’t want to be boggled down with details when it came to the purchasing process. Converged systems like t…

In part one of this series we covered the internals of HDDs, in part two we went over the internals of SSD, In part three we continue reviewing storage concepts to refresh or learn the right lingo. Lets start by understanding “Redundant Array of Independent Disks” (RAID). There are RAID levels like…