My CCIE Journey

My Name is Inder Singh (CCIE DC#42970). I am currently based in Bangalore and associated with an IT consulting company as a DC Architect. I have started this blog to help CCIE DC aspirants become experts in Cisco DC technologies by sharing my knowledge and 10 years of  experience in the industry.

After passing the CCIE DC lab exam in March 2014, I realized that the amount of hard-work I had put into preparing for it yielded good results. Not only did I become CCIE DC Certified but also took on the new role  DC design architect.

My CCIE Journey started way back in 2010 when I was preparing for the CCIE Routing and Switching exam. For that, I needed a qualified CCIE Certified instructor, so I googled to find out institutes providing CCIE Training. Unfortunately, the institutes I found and visited thereafter disappointed me, because during the demo class they could not answer simple questions such as…What is the destination address in BPDUs? What is RD and RT? How scalable are OSPF and  EIGRP protocols?  None of the instructors were convincing. I visited almost all the institutes with no luck.

Fortunately a friend of mine referred me to a CCIE R&S certified instructor from whom he had taken training and went onto become CCIE certified. So after meeting the instructor I instantly realized that this was the right person I was looking for! Under his guidance I studied/prepared for about 1.5 years. I covered all the topics and did loads of hands-on work but unfortunately I failed in CCIE R&S on 16 Dec 2012. It was a big setback for me as I passed troubleshooting section but fell short of 15 marks in the configuration exam. I wanted to give it another try but then I realized that I have already got good control over it and should try to learn some other technology. I decided to contact my CCIE R&S instructor and he advised me to go for CCIE DC, since he was also planning to go for it. We decided to include two more people and soon become a gang of four, all wanting to do CCIE DC.

 After forming the study group, we divided the entire course into four parts :

- Nexus

- UCS

- Storage

- Virtualization and N1000v

 We met every weekend from March 2013 to Oct 2014 for theory and Nov 2013 to March 2014 for Lab practice. Preparing for such a long time was not easy but the motivation to learn the technology kept all of us going. Eventually on 24th of March I successfully passed the exam!

My message to CCIE DC aspirants is to work hard and to dive deeply into all aspects of the DC technologies. I studied for at least 600 hours. So there is no short/easy way to pass CCIE DC. Once you have control over all the technologies (nexus, storage, ucs and virtualization), then do your lab practice and sit the exam. But don’t forget, you need to religiously study for at least 5 hours every day.

Hope, information above was helpful and informative! If anyone wants guidance from me please email me at cciedctraining@gmail.com.