SDN Appears in Cisco Career Certs: The New CCNA (and CCNP) Cloud

Most of us probably don’t sit around meticulously reading the exam topics of vendor certification exams. But if you did, you might have noticed the announcement of a few new career certifications from Cisco this week. And if you look closely at one of the exam blueprints, for the first of two exams related to the CCNA Cloud certification, you’d see a bit of a milestone:

  • The first Cisco career cert exam blueprints that mention ACI
  • The first Cisco career cert exam blueprints that mention SDN

In today’s post, I’ll outline the key facts about the new certs, and look more closely at the exam blueprint for one of the exams. And the most interesting exam topic, given that it’s the first Cisco career cert exam with SDN in it?

“Describe how ACI solves the problem not addressed by SDN”.

Read on!

Quick Overview

Cisco refers to their CCNA, CCNP, and CCIE certifications as career certifications. The CCNA Cloud and CCNA Industrial certifications push the total number of current Cisco CCNA certifications up to 11.

As for an SDN angle – this blog is called SDNSkills, after all - the cloud certs happen to be Cisco’s first career certifications (best Continue reading

Tor connections to hidden services could be easy to de-anonymize

Identifying users who access Tor hidden services—websites that are only accessible inside the Tor anonymity network—is easier than de-anonymizing users who use Tor to access regular Internet websites.Security researchers Filipo Valsorda and George Tankersley showed Friday at the Hack in the Box security conference in Amsterdam why Tor connections to hidden services are more vulnerable to traffic correlation attacks.One of Tor’s primary goals is to provide anonymity for Internet users. This is achieved by routing their Web traffic through a series of randomly chosen nodes or relays before passing it back onto the public Internet.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Intel reportedly close to purchasing Altera for $15 billion

Intel and Altera are apparently once again on speaking terms and said to be nearing a deal in which Intel would buy the smaller chip maker for US$15 billion.News of a possible deal first surfaced in media reports in late March, but those negotiations broke down after Altera supposedly rejected a bid of $54 per share from Intel in early April.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Juniper Networks Announces New Network Design Training Curriculum and Certification Program

Juniper took a big step forward in rounding out their certification programs by announcing a new Design Training and Certification curriculum, focusing on best practices and techniques that can be used across the spectrum of network architecture and design. Slated to be included in this program are also technologies around software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV).

This is a huge step forward for Juniper's training and certification program and will round out their education portfolio with something similar to Cisco's design certification. Furthermore with the advent of network automation, and SDN and NFV technologies becoming more commonplace, the benefits from such a training and certification curriculum can't be overstated.

The design curriculum will eventually include a portfolio of training offerings, starting with the first course which is available now, the Juniper Networks Design Fundamentals course. These courses and their corresponding design certifications will focus on the latest techniques, resources and various tools that companies can use to fully design, secure, and automate their networks. Trainings will range all the way from design fundamentals on through to more advanced courses covering the design specific requirements of Data Center and WAN networks. The first certification, Juniper Networks Certified Design Associate (JNCDA) is available for registration now, Continue reading

PlexxiPulse—The Open Networking Summit

In two weeks, we’ll be heading to Santa Clara, CA for the Open Networking Summit hosted in partnership with the Open Networking Foundation. Plexxi co-founder and EVP of products and technology Dave Husak is participating in the “Hot Startups & Investing: Building Business with Open Source–VC perspective” panel on June 16 at 2:00 p.m. PT at the Santa Clara Convention Center. The Open Networking Summit draws networking’s best and brightest, and we’re excited to learn from this year’s impressive lineup of speakers. Heading to the event? Let us know on Twitter or send us a note at [email protected]. See you there!

Below please find a few of our top picks for our favorite news articles of the week.

TechTarget: Converged vs. hyper-converged landscape: What does it mean?
By Dave Raffo
Confused by all the talk about converged vs. hyper-converged infrastructure in the data center and what it means to storage? If so, you are not alone. Consultant Scott Lowe laid out pros and cons of approaches to convergence and how they differ this week during the Modern Infrastructure Summit in Chicago. Lowe, founder and managing consultant of The 1610 Group, told conference attendees that the rise of convergence Continue reading

Cisco sees Internet half full

Cisco’s most recent Visual Networking Index (VNI), the ongoing report of Internet and IP trends and statistics, finds that more than half of the world’s population will be Internet users by 2019. Also, the number of machine-to-machine (M2M) interconnections – the underpinning of the Internet of Things/Everything – will triple by then.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

HTIRW: Internet Exchange Points

Most providers — transit, edge, and content — are pretty obvious to the various users of the Internet. Users interact with edge and content providers every day, and transit providers have such large names in the industry that they’re often the subject of news and other articles. But who actually connects all these different providers […]

Author information

Russ White

Principal Engineer at Ericsson

Russ White has scribbled a basket of books, penned a plethora of patents, written a raft of RFCs, taught a trencher of classes, nibbled and noodled at a lot of networks, and done a lot of other stuff you either already know about — or don't really care about. You can find Russ at 'net Work, the Internet Protocol Journal, LinkedIn, and his author page on Amazon.
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The post HTIRW: Internet Exchange Points appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Russ White.

What the CCIE does not Prove

I came across an article today about a 19-year-old who earned his CCIE. It reminded me of a Reddit post from a few weeks ago. Someone asked why, when evaluating a CCIE, hiring managers still demand a number of years of practical experience in the field.

I'm in a situation where I'm a CCNP with 3 years of experience. I want to get my CCIE but I keep being told left and right I don't have enough experience and I'll never get a CCIE job without 7 years of experience. Am I supposed to just laze around and wait until I get more experience? It just doesn't make sense.

This is a fairly common misunderstanding among people new to our field, and is largely the result of vendor marketing. People want so badly to believe that a certification proves their worth as an individual, when in reality its value is much more narrowly defined.

Continue reading · 44 comments

What the CCIE does not Prove

I came across an article today about a 19-year-old who earned his CCIE. It reminded me of a Reddit post from a few weeks ago. Someone asked why, when evaluating a CCIE, hiring managers still demand a number of years of practical experience in the field.

I'm in a situation where I'm a CCNP with 3 years of experience. I want to get my CCIE but I keep being told left and right I don't have enough experience and I'll never get a CCIE job without 7 years of experience. Am I supposed to just laze around and wait until I get more experience? It just doesn't make sense.

This is a fairly common misunderstanding among people new to our field, and is largely the result of vendor marketing. People want so badly to believe that a certification proves their worth as an individual, when in reality its value is much more narrowly defined.

Continue reading · 44 comments

What the CCIE does not Prove

I came across an article today about a 19-year-old who earned his CCIE. It reminded me of a Reddit post from a few weeks ago. Someone asked why, when evaluating a CCIE, hiring managers still demand a number of years of practical experience in the field.

I'm in a situation where I'm a CCNP with 3 years of experience. I want to get my CCIE but I keep being told left and right I don't have enough experience and I'll never get a CCIE job without 7 years of experience. Am I supposed to just laze around and wait until I get more experience? It just doesn't make sense.

This is a fairly common misunderstanding among people new to our field, and is largely the result of vendor marketing. People want so badly to believe that a certification proves their worth as an individual, when in reality its value is much more narrowly defined.

Continue reading · 2 comments

9 most important announcements at Google I/O 2015

What's new with GoogleGoogle I/O, the search giant's annual developer conference, kicked off yesterday with a number of big announcements. Here are some of the more interesting and impactful items we learned about Google's upcoming software initiatives.Android MGoogle announced Android 6.0 is coming later this year. Tentatively dubbed Android M – we're sure a candy-themed name like Milky Way is likely to be announced soon – the next iteration of Android promises to improve overall speed, performance, and polish, while introducing a number of interesting features.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Seven things Google is doing to please developers

At its I/O keynote, Google did its best to get developers excited about building apps for Android with new tools and money-making schemes. But Google is also expanding support for developers who’d rather create iOS apps.Google hasn’t always been the best partner a developer could have, but this year’s I/O conference is showing how that’s changing with better developer tools and services. Here are some of the most important ones announced by the company during the opening keynote.Android Studio gets C/C++ supportGoogle launched a preview of Android Studio version 1.3, which includes some useful features. The most notable addition to the IDE is code editing and debugging for C and C++. This means Java and C/C++ code support is integrated into one environment free of charge for Android app developers, letting them choose between the two languages. The implementation is based on the JetBrains Clion platform, and the Google NDK (native development kit) plugin provides features such as error correction and code completion. Version 1.3 also offers faster build speeds and a new memory profile.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How wearables will shape the future of mobile payments

Last week, at the Wearable World Congress in San Francisco, executives from Capital One, MasterCard and PayPal participated in an animated discussion about the future of mobile payments and explained why wearable technology is an important part of their companies' game plans.Speaking from a shadowy stage in the city's Palace of Fine Arts Theatre, just spitting distance from the Golden Gate Bridge and the Pacific Ocean, Stephane Wyper, MasterCard's vice president of startup engagement and acceleration, said MasterCard's is focused on leveraging the latest and greatest gadgets, including wearables, to create loyal customers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading 05:29

This week hasn’t been so much about IT as it has about installing faucets and workbenches… A bit of a crazy week. But I promise I won’t post links about plumbing for you to read. Well, maybe just network plumbing.

I’m speaking at NANOG this coming week. If you’re in the San Fransisco area, you should come by the conference — it’s some of the best industry insight and information you’re going to get from any conference or show, anywhere. And it’s small enough you can actually meet everyone there over the course of the sessions, and get to know folks on the provider side of the industry.

As we get faster at data processing companies “get better” at making use of real time data processing to find a way to make money. The latest seems to be code injection — described in this Infoworld article — putting popups on a web page in mid stream to sell a service, remind you to refill your minutes, or just buy something. Want to make the situation even more frightening? Change the injection in the first paragraph to an ad from a drug company popping over the conversation, rather than a reminder Continue reading

Skip the waiter and order with this Bluetooth mat

If you hate waiting for restaurant servers and can’t abide mistakes in your order, there’s an app—and a mat—for that.Putmenu lets diners send their choices directly to a restaurant’s kitchen once they place their smartphone on a smart mat. All they have to do is pick up the mat’s ID via a Bluetooth LE link, order through the app and wait for the food to arrive.Of course, it also minimizes human interaction with restaurant staff and could threaten their jobs. But someone still has to bring out the food.At a demo in Tokyo on Friday, a smartphone with the app was placed on the Bluetooth mat. The mat’s ID was immediately registered, allowing burgers on a mock menu to be ordered. The order was then printed by a cloud-linked kitchen terminal.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Upload: Your tech news briefing for Friday, May 29

Google I/O brings a boatload of updates for mobile, payments, Internet of ThingsGoogle’s annual I/O conference was chock-full of developments, starting with the next update to its mobile operating system, code-named Android M. Improvements to the core user experience include an overhauled permissions system. The bottom line is that it should be easier for developers to get users to install and update their apps, because they will no longer ask users to agree to a long list of permissions up front. Instead, apps will query users when they try to use a feature that requires a permission, and let them allow or deny those at will.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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