Questions about Juniper certs

Mah Bahls

Hey guys,

I was just curious about how valuable a Juniper cert is in the long run. I work for Toyota, and they live off of Juniper. That said, I haven't had much experience outside of Toyota to base work experience off of. Is juniper a large enough resource to justify a few months of training for an entry level cert? Thanks for the advice

Ahriakin

If you mean as a generic knowledge benefit most will advise you to go Cisco first and then add Juniper later, I'd agree. In the enterprise Cisco still rules but the closer you get to carrier class networks the more you will see Juniper as a requirement (or at least a major plus) so having the basics down is not going to hurt your career.
But you're already working with them so obviously it's a no-brainer to do them first. And the Entry level cert is not that hard if you have decent network experience, a little easier than the CCNA imho (but not by much).

nel

The cisco tracks kind of set the background theory etc of the subject. The fast track juniper certs have material which assume you know many of the area already and then show you the juniper way.

Routing wise, juniper is awesome. JunOS is a good OS, switching wise my experience with the ex4200's have been woeful.

Overall, i'd def recommend adding juniper certs to your cisco stuff. Juniper are definitely going to be pushing the market share over the next several years.

unclerico

A Juniper cert can do nothing but help you. Get HP and Brocade too. The more platforms you have experience with the better. I've got a few Cisco Certs under my belt, but that didn't stop me from choosing Juniper over Cisco for our core data and storage switching.

Nel, please share what you've seen with the EX series. I've got 2200/3200/4200/4500 running all over in my environment and couldn't be happier. Just curious (sorry to threadjack)...

nel

unclerico wrote: »

A Juniper cert can do nothing but help you. Get HP and Brocade too. The more platforms you have experience with the better. I've got a few Cisco Certs under my belt, but that didn't stop me from choosing Juniper over Cisco for our core data and storage switching.

Nel, please share what you've seen with the EX series. I've got 2200/3200/4200/4500 running all over in my environment and couldn't be happier. Just curious (sorry to threadjack)...

Well one example, we have alot of vlans which have acls on. We got them in and found out that the did not support firewall logging. Pretty fundamental imo - after all, if you allow the use of an ACL why wouldnt you want someone to be able to log and see what activity is going on there?!?. There were quite a few other things, but i suspect that the objectives the business set were trying to more than a switch would do. Other things included problems with VLAN traffic graphing and so forth all which were not supported at the time. In a basic L2/L3 setup they were absolutely fine, however, these were being deployed in a DC. i was very impressed with virtual chassis too. Thing that annoyed me was this design was put forward by juniper and a partner, then when we went back and said, look, these dont work to our requirements set it was basically like "uh" and we were offered a crappy buy back price for them. Then when we were upgrading our core devices Juniper seemed pretty slow/half arsed with their offer and solution. So we had a few bad experiences with them too. Juniper offered us mx240's, cisco came in and blew them out of the water with ASR 9ks both in price, functionality, and going the extra mile to win the deal. Shame, as a would of preferred juniper in the core and maybe cisco for the DCs.

im not trying to slag them here (sorry if it comes across that way) as i love junos. we've just had some bad experiences as of late.

What kind of functionality do you use on the 4200's? i work in a small isp environment.

Aldur

Sorry to hear about your bad experience. I know where sales are involved that things do not always go as smoothly as possible, or planned for that matter. Interesting that Cisco came in below the price point with the mx240s and ASR 9ks. I've seen so many time where the solution from Cisco is considerably priced higher than the Juniper solution, and Cisco tends to stick to their guns since they are the big guys on the block. But I suppose every sale is different.

As far as your L2 firewall problem, I believe that is implemented now. It least I know it is a part of 11.1, I'm not sure exactly which version of code first implemented it.

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