Worst idea ever?

Iristheangel

malcybood wrote: »

Sure, but if someone asks the company what about the CCIE Collaboration Track and the company respond saying it will be out "soon" where they then search the internet finding that there is a plethora of threads which reiterate this i.e. comments from people saying they have waited x number of months or years then still buy it - that is rather naive, but I bet they will still put the company in bad light.

Consumers have a right to review products, absolutely no issue with that as long as it's reflective of what has actually happened, otherwise what's the point?

That's exactly why we bring it up in a public forum Or that fact that they still haven't completed the SP track. Or stuck to their dates on the CCIE DC v2. You're saying you don't like the comments about grievances with INE because people might make the company look bad but then saying that customers should search for these things prior to making a purchase. Also... a company shouldn't bait and switch by saying something is coming shortly and then not deliver in 2 years or respond to customers who paid for it. I don't care about mentioning that because it makes the company look bad - it's something they should be honest about when things change.

malcybood wrote: »

Yes, I've seen this a lot with Expert level exams and don't agree with training companies doing the whole name drop for signing up to something.

Life isn't just about money and 300k per year is not to be sniffed at. There is a number of other "big hitters" in the networking industry working for such large web scale companies, so I don't see the issue with it.

Can't see it happening anyway, but my point was merely that it would be better for CCIE candidates if someone like Brian was involved in delivering training than if he wasn't.

I completely agree that $300K isn't something to scoff about but trainers at INE aren't making that much money. I'm sure the owners are though and that's why I say that they probably won't close shop to take a pay cut to work being someone else's employee. I could be wrong and maybe INE is in worse financial straits but I'm pretty sure Brian hasn't been in an operational role in awhile. Even if he does decide to take that route, oh well.... If there's a need in the market, I'm sure there will be healthy competition that comes along.

malcybood wrote: »

It's not just about the materials, it's also about the quality of the delivery.

I completely agree here. Sadly, I wish the content had better quality. I.e. the CCIE DC workbooks they force us to pay for in order to rent racks would be of much better quality (and all of them work with the current racks), the CCIE R&S videos had all the 20-30 minute typo hunts edited out, videos telling us "here's where to find how to configure this in the documentation" (Btw, if you take Brian's advice and go into the CCIE R&S without knowing how to configure DMVPN and relying on the documentation, 99% sure you're going to have big problems), etc, etc

malcybood wrote: »

"were"..............does this mean all of these companies are no longer investing in the pods / making money? I genuinely don't know other than IPX is rather obvious.

To provide a rack which covers all functionality for CCIE DC what is required - hardware or software? i.e. modelling labs or physical N77k, UCS servers, MDS etc? If it's hardware from a functionality perspective this would be prohibitive for most even using NFR.

A single Nexus 7702 with an F3 card + SUP2E and promo license bundle is in the region of 100K USD list per chassis, so multiply that by 2, 3 or 4 to provide a dual DC topology then even on NFR which is around 70% discount I believe you're talking about more than 100k USD CAPEX investment and is impossible without the demand for it.

MDS switches are ridiculously expensive also in the context of what they would be used for and I guess you would also need a B-Series chassis, UCS director, N5k and FEXs in there too? Not to mention connectivity and co-location hosting for rack space and power.

I'm not saying that it isn't possible as it clearly is for some and maybe virtual labs hosted on AWS or something like that will make it even more possible in the future (if not already).

The Collaboration & CUCM side of things may be more achievable as it can all be hosted on VM servers, but I reckon you would probably need a beefy B-Series server to provider multi-tenancy to allow multiple students to use it if that was a requirement.

Wireless and Security would be exactly the same; whereas R&S there is a lot more equipment available, even older kit that can run the required IOS.

Point being it's a major investment NFR or not and the scale would ultimately determine the outlay.

On that note I'm bowing out of this one and will leave you folks to it. Thanks for the discussion and have a nice day

NFR for the training partners is about 80% off if I recall correctly. The ACI lab starter bundle would be about $20K after discounts, they could also use the ACI simulator which would be MUCH cheaper (~3-4K), MDSes aren't on the new version of the CCIE DC lab, UCS director and all the licensing for 7004 would be bundled with C1 licensing so a LOT off on pricing, etc, etc. As far as other CCIE tracks, a lot can be achieved with virtualization and you can certainly remove a lot of the hard requirements for space, vCPUs, and RAM if you aren't pushing a lot of traffic or load through it. Our Z2H pods for security were sitting on top of old Dell servers they got off ebay for like $300. I have the screenshots as Piotr was going through it and explaining how to build our own lab. He was running ISE 2.0, WSA, ESA, 4-5 Windows machines, Firepower, vNGIPS, a couple CSR1000vs, some ASAvs, etc for each pod.

As far as "were," I meant that only in reference to IPX. There are a lot of companies providing these rack rentals and making good money with it. Simple Google search Those companies are still doing rack rentals or building their rack rentals. We have a Global Knowledge employee on TE who's job is to maintain the CCIE DC racks. I can't remember his name for the life of me (Sorry if you read this!). I know FastLane has some ACI pods and Lumos is building over a dozen.

iseeyou

i totally agree with @Iristheangel point of view with regards to INE. i did purchase DC workbook but i discovered that the volume 2 task cannot be performed on INE Rack because the full rack for volume 2 is only available during bootcamp ( simply means i have to attend bootcamp to practice volume 2 for DC), i dont think is ok for customers that purchased rack rental and workbook only to discover that you cannot practice what you paid for.

secondly the time it takes for INE to release some videos is totally unacceptable and the rate of timeline changes has been too frequent recently, sometimes i wonder if only brian is working on all CCIE tracks.

personally, i believe INE needs to improve their service delivery, am decided to go for R&S track and i hope to use INE all the same..lol
still trying to recover from my huge DC investment lost with IPEXPERT!!!