Rolandes Ramblings

Now that I have finally passed the CCIE exam, I keep my fingers crossed that it just keeps getting harder and harder in order to keep the numbers down. So when I saw this latest update announcement regarding the written and lab exams I was really surprised. I understand that they have to keep current technology on the exam that is applicable to real world networks. So, the fact that they are adding the 3825 platform is no big deal. In addition expanding to cover 12.3 and 12.4 versions of IOS is pretty much expected in order to have platform support with the latest hardware.

However, the fact that they are removing DLSw, ISDN, and ATM from both the written exam and the lab exam is very surprising to me. I would suspect from my own first-hand experience that these technologies are still very heavily entrenched in production enterprise networks. I completely agree with the removal of IS-IS and PPPoE as these are definitely fringe technologies in the enteprise at best and belong on the Service Provider exam. Still without ISDN on the Routing & Switching lab they eliminate all of the nasty Dial on Demand routing problems they are famous for. This is still a very heavily used technology for branch backup which is why I am surprised they opted to remove it so soon from the exam. I assume that more and more enterprises have moved away from ATM and over to an MPLS core which would make sense. I still see DLSw in heavy use in environments with remote SNA devices or other protocols that they prefer not to natively route like IPX. I guess it makes sense at some point to retire this topic from the exam but it just seems like they did it earlier than they should have.

News and Announcements-CCIE - Cisco Systems