RE: Passed CCIE Storage!! Triple CCIE!

Rick,

How much day to day work do you do not counting prep for the lab with the MDS gear?

Robert

-----Original Message-----
From: nobody_at_groupstudy.com [mailto:nobody_at_groupstudy.com] On Behalf Of Rick Mur
Sent: Wednesday, August 04, 2010 11:18 PM
To: Cisco certification
Subject: Passed CCIE Storage!! Triple CCIE!

After a little over 3 months of intense preparation I passed the CCIE Storage lab today! Officially making me a triple CCIE :-D I can't describe how happy I am at the moment as it was a very intense wait for the results as this one is hand graded, so you don't get the results overnight.

For preparation I used the Cisco Press titles on SAN, the excellent Fibre Channel Bench Reference Guide and the ieMentor Storage Workbook and Walkthrough Guide.

If you are preparing for storage be sure that you really build up your speed as the storage lab is quite complex in terms of questioning as there are usually multiple possibilities to solve things and they are very much looking for 1 specific solution (it's the same in all tracks, but I found that in particular with this one).
They really ask you about the whole blueprint! If you are familiar and comfortable with the ieMentor labs you have all the technical knowledge you need, just pay very close attention to the tasks and what you are doing.

As of hardware, together with Tyson Scott we build 2 full-scale racks with 3 MDS switches that we can do about 85-90% of all technologies. I also used the ieMentor vRack a couple times to practice a few extra features that we didn't have licenses for. That rack unfortunately doesn't hold a Storage Services Module (SSM) or Generation 2 linecards (where you have to deal with oversubscription).

I'd like to thank Tyson Scott for his support and building and maintaining the racks, Roman Rodichev for his excellent workbook and personal support/coaching and Antonella Corno for her alltime support on the Cisco Learning Network community and the fantastic sessions she teaches almost every week.

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Regards,
Rick Mur
CCIE3 #21946 (R&S / Service Provider / Storage) Sr. Support Engineer  IPexpert, Inc.
URL: http://www.IPexpert.com
Blogs and organic groups at http://www.ccie.net