From: Colin McNamara (colin@2cups.com)
Date: Wed Jun 20 2007 - 15:57:40 ART
My background is all over the place. It goes from running a small ISP
when I was 18 to managing international CallManager clusters, to
enterprise data center design and migrations. I swear that I have tech
ADD. I see something new and I am like.. oooooh shiny, lets do a sniff
and see how it works.
I actually attempted the Route Switch lab twice in 2002 (still had token
ring and dlsw still) but got activated for the war before I could get my
number. I can tell you.. that sucked horribly.
So, why did I choose to get my Storage CCIE first instead of finishing
up my Route Switch first? Well, over the past couple years I have done a
significant amount of IP storage (NFS, ISCSI, ATA over Ethernet, etc)
including building my own IP storage heads based on linux. I had also
done a little bit of fiber channel work. I felt that I had a significant
advantage compared to most network engineers in the storage networking
space. And, I think more importantly, the topics that I had to study
were new and fresh. Whereas when I cracked open my Route Switch books..
I honestly wasn't to excited about it at the time ( I think I was
holding a grudge from my first attempts in 2002).
The partner e-learning central portion of Cisco has an Excellent lab
access to labgear.net. It gives you 2 hour segments of time with 2 mds's
(both with IPS blades), 1 2 port jbod, and 2 2 port servers. They also
have introductory tutorials for most major technology segments.
I did all of those, along with the every E-learning class that was on
PEC. I think the major ones were the Design, Support, and CASSI classes.
I took that, sat for the design and support specialist exams, and took
my written last December.
After doing all that work, I was honestly 70% there. I took a little
break for january and febuary (There was no open lab dates) and then
started hitting the labs I think at the end of febuary.
For the majority of my practice I used the labs available through PEC. I
also was able to weasel my way into 8 hour sessions every sunday from
our channel SE. (I owe him plenty of drinks at networkers this year) For
those 8 hour sessions I had labs created to summarize the major
technology areas and to be as evil as possible to myself.
I had one attempt which didn't work out as well as I would have liked.
In RTP the lab starts at 7:15. This means if you are from the west coast
like I am you will be getting up at 3:00 am in the morning for your lab.
That royally kicked my but. I diverted from my attack plan and ended up
running out of time. It was a classic example of letting the lab run
you, instead of you running the lab.
Luckily a data opened up just over a month later. I spent that time just
working on my speed (speed is the secret sauce). I migrated to using
Fabric Manager (gui interface) instead of command line. After 2 practice
runs my time had dropped 25%. I also flew out to RTP 3 days before, and
made sure to relax and get on east coast time.
For my final prep I got access to iementor's lab. Their lab is
excellent. I cannot reinforce enough how much it contributed to my
confidence in that final week. Roman was really cool about working with
an existing candidate to get me squeezed in. They are really cool guys,
and they have the only workbook on the market right now.
So, I used their lab 2 days before mine, and then just chilled the day
before. The day of the lab I had 70 points by lunch, and had completed
configuration of the lab by 12:30. I spent the rest of the day reviewing
my configurations (found 2 errors), fixing one bug, and generally
harassing the proctor to make sure I didn't misinterpret anything.
So.. if I had it all to do over again what would I do.
I would still do the PEC stuff, and continue to primarily live in the
Doc CD. Though I would probably pony up the cash and buy the iementor
book and more lab time with them.
--Colin
On Wed, 2007-06-20 at 12:34 -0500, Scott Thornton wrote:
> Welcome to the group!
>
> If you don't mind me asking, what material did you use for the Storage
> IE? I've been looking at pursuing that. What was your background
> prior to taking it? Can you recommend any material to purchase?
>
> Thanks!
>
> On 6/20/07, Colin McNamara <colin@2cups.com> wrote:
> Good morning,
>
> My name is Colin, I currently hold my CCIE in Storage
> Networking, and
> live in San Diego. I am planning on making my Route Switch
> attempts in
> the late fall (haven't really decided on a date yet).
>
> I look forward to studying with the people on this list
>
> --
> Regards,
> Colin McNamara
> CCIE #18233
> "The difficult we do immediatly, the impossible just takes a
> little longer"
>
> _______________________________________________________________________
> Subscription information may be found at:
> http://www.groupstudy.com/list/CCIELab.html
>
>
>
> --
> Scott C Thornton
>
> Notice: This e-mail (including attachments) is covered by the
> Electronic
> Communications Privacy Act, 18 U.S.C. 2510-2521, is confidential and
> may be
> legally privileged. If you are not the intended recipient, you are
> hereby
> notified that any retention, dissemination, distribution, or copying
> of this
> communication is strictly prohibited. Please reply to the sender that
> you
> have received the message in error, then delete it. Thank you.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Sun Jul 01 2007 - 17:24:50 ART