While I agree with your basic point, let me say the following inline:
""Neal Rauhauser 402-301-9555"" wrote in message [EMAIL PROTECTED]">news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]... > I recently asked who was doing CCIP and got a raft of responses - "Its > just like the CCNP", "Just got get your CCIE", "It doesn't make sense". > > Rather than continuing that thread I thought I'd highlight the > differences and mention why the CCIP is more interesting than CCIE in > many cases. > > > The CCNP covers routing, switching, remote access, and > troubleshooting. When completed, the cert holder is capable of entering > IOS commands without having too many of them spelled out, and can > identify the correct books to read to fill in his/her knowledge gaps. No > disrespect intended - I've got it, its done wonders for my career, but > the biggest effect I've seen is that it has let me accurately articulate > just how much further I have to go. > > The CCIE is full of useless crap from the perspective of a service > provider. DLSw+? I mean, do I care about this? And IPX? And Appletalk? > If you're in a provider environment I *suppose* you could argue it might > be of some use, but I bet I can make just as good an argument for > getting your real estate license as a career booster. > > Now look at the CCIP. Nothing *but* routing as a fundamental > requirement. Well, I wouldn't say that. The multicast/QoS test is a fundamental test, and this is a weird requirement for providers, for reasons I will get into below. >If you read the other stuff you can see Cisco things this > is for the big boys only - you'll be working 12xxx boxes and you don't > care much about ISDN dial support. I agree that the ISDN stuff is not relevant for providers. But since you mention the GSR, I would point out that the CCIP has nothing much to do with the 12xxx boxes either, just like the CCNP or the R/S CCIE have nothing to do with them. I would think that a proper provider-oriented test would test you on knowledge of the various GSR Engine-x line-cards, some questions on the architecture of the GSR, differences between the IOS 'S' train vs. the "normal" IOS train, and things like that. The CCIP doesn't get into those areas. > > Where are you going to get good MPLS information? Cisco Press has a > book out, but CCIE != person who read and fully understood that book. I > need to configure it, not just be able to define the acronym. On the other hand, MPLS is only an elective, it is not a core requirement. CCIP's might know absolutely nothing about MPLS. For example, CCIP's could have done the security elective which is nothing more than the CSS-1 and is consequently very enterprise-ish. > > And then there is multicast. Conceptually simple, fundamentally evil, > and known to attract wing nuts with business plans based on it. I've got > two wing nuts with their checkbooks cocked and locked right now - if > they can't run a single 384k stream from their site and have it fan out > to N+1 paying remotes I get to keep eating Ramen, instead of moving up > to TV dinners. Well, I don't happen to know any wing-nuts who are attacted enough to multicasting to throw money at it, and neither does my circle of colleagues. If you happen to know a few, well, more power to you. But let's face it, how many multicasting applications are in widespread use out there? Not very many. And of those few, how many are actually used across the public Internet (as opposed to just within a single enterprise or possibly several enterprises through an extranet) and are highly popular? While lots of people talk about multicasting as the next big thing, the fact is unicast sessions are the overwhelming majority of all network communications whether it's enterprise or provider you're talking about. And if anything, while multicasting apps are rare no matter where you look, they tend to be more common within the enterprise space. Things like e-learning or intracampus webcasts and that kind of thing. Compare that to the how much multicasting is done by a provider, and it is almost certainly less (if you don't believe it, then simply ask yourself how many times you use the Internet for a unicast application like web-surfing or email vs. how many times do you actually use the Internet for a multicast application). So a test on multicasting should really more properly belong on an enterprise-cert, simply because it's enterprises who are using it more (although, again, even enterprises are using it only rarely). Same thing with QoS - while most enterprises haven't implemented complex QoS, neither have most providers (in IP networks, as opposed to FR or ATM), for the simple reason that most organizations (enterprise or provider) don't understand their traffic-flow patterns well enough to properly design a complex policy. And furthermore, even if a provider could possibly understand its flows well enough such that it could offer certain customers better QoS, what exactly would be the point of that if customer traffic is simply going to be handed off to another provider for which no such QoS policies are in place? There's little point in getting good quality of service from one provider if you're just going to get crappy quality of service from the adjacent provider. You need to have good quality of service from end-to-end for it to make sense. Unfortunately, there is no "BGP"-like mechanism at this time for providers to pass QoS policies to each other. So it is unclear to me why a QoS test belongs in a provider-oriented cert. > > > There are a lot of other very heavy things in the various CCIP tracks, > I'm just touching on the ones that can be done with gear I can afford > and appeal to my existing customer base. Now I do agree with you that on the whole, the CCIP is more geared towards the provider than the CCNP. But not by much. The BSCI, yes, is a step in the right direction. But then you have that weird multicast/QoS test that, if it belongs anywhere, really belongs in an enterprise cert (although it probably doesn't belong anywhere at all). And then you have the elective part that may or may not be fulfilled with provider-technologies. Again, the security elective is nothing more than the CSS1, which is very enterprise-ish. 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