Free Brocade Certification Exam Voucher

Free Brocade Certification Exam Voucher for 1 of 13 Exams between 4/3 and 4/23/2013Here is a chance to take a Brocade Certification Exam at no charge!

April Certification Spectacular

Brocade is ringing in Spring, with a special limited incentive for people to get certified. To qualify, you must register, and take your Pearson VUE certification exam between 4/3/2013 and 4/23/2013. The promotion is open to anyone, and is good for one exam per person. To get your exam voucher, prior to registering, send an email to jcannata@Brocade.com, and mention the April promotion. You will receive your voucher within 24-hours.

If you have already registered and paid for an exam, we cannot give you credit back for that. This is for new exam registrations only. The offer does not apply for accreditation exams with Kryterion.

More information on the Fee Exam: Free Certification Exams - Limited Offer Until ... | Brocade Communities

Brocade Certification additional information: Certification and Accreditation Programs

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Comments

NetworkVeteran

Thanks for the tip! Note, the BCNE is free even apart from this with purchase of the associated Web-Based Training.

ChickenNuggetz

Wow, not too bad, thanks for the tip. I'm assuming BCNE is the Brocade equivalent to Cisco's CCNA? The environment I'm in currently doesnt use Brocade equipment, so I'm not sure if this would be a waste of my time or not...

NetworkVeteran

If you're fluent with IOS, you will find many Brocade commands are the same or similar. This is not uncommon in networking, and one reason Cisco certifications are valued as general networking certifications. That said, the BCNE focuses more on laggs and QoS than the CCNA. I do touch Brocade at work, so a small detour might not be a complete waste for me.

Sounds Good

Anyone know how difficult these exams are if you're already studying for CCNA? Looking at the BCNE, you need a 58% to pass which is somewhat laughable...

I would take a slight detour from CCNA studies to study for a free exam. Anyone know any resources?

networker050184

Plenty of free resources on their website. I've never took one personally so can't comment on the difficulty.

I might check out the BCSPNE though. We have some Brocades in the network and a few in the lab to mess around with.

NetworkVeteran

networker050184 wrote: »

Plenty of free resources on their website.

Agreed. They offer BCNE in a nutshell (free), extended resources (free), and WBT courses (paid).

Regarding its difficulty, knowing the percentage you need to get right is not enough to determine that. As an entry-level exam, I don't imagine it's particularly hard, but remember your goal should be to be able to utilize that knowledge on-the-job and in interviews. If you have any incentive to take this, you probably have an incentive to take it semi-seriously.

it_consultant

Sounds Good wrote: »

Anyone know how difficult these exams are if you're already studying for CCNA? Looking at the BCNE, you need a 58% to pass which is somewhat laughable...

I would take a slight detour from CCNA studies to study for a free exam. Anyone know any resources?

Its an honest test. If you are already familiar with QOS, POE, and LAG from experience and you have your CCNA knowledge then it shouldn't be a problem. However, if you just certified CCNA and you take the exam blind then you will have a rude awakening. It is a little deeper and a bit less broad than Cisco - for whatever that is worth. Let me put it to you this way, haven taken the BCNE test (and passing) and taken the BCNP training (haven't taken the exam yet) then studying for CCNP, CCNP SWITCH seems like a step back in switching principles both in difficulty and where the industry is in real practice.

If you know any Brocade Certified SAN guys ask them about the FC exams, that will give you an idea of how challenging (in general) you can expect Brocade exams to be.

dave330i

Always up for a free cert and we use Brocade at work, so some knowledge on it would be nice. Too bad I have so many other things going on right now.

N2IT

Free certs are one of my favorites. Nice work to the OP

dave330i

Somehow I deluded myself into believing 5 days is enough study time to pass BCFA with my background.

N2IT

Dave with your aptitude it wouldn't surprise me.

Sounds Good

e-mailed them for the voucher at 11 am and got the voucher by 5pm.

scheduled the BCNE for the 20th. Time for a little bit of Brocade brain-washing

offtopic wordplay: Broke-Aid

dave330i

5 days was a little nuts. Managed to adjust my schedule and gave myself 12 days to study.

N2IT

Good luck gang. In my world the certification makes very little sense, but if it's free and adds value go for it!

odysseyelite

Broke Aid is the nick name I have for them at work. I have not had the best of luck dealing with their CNAs.

prtech

Thanks OP! I got the voucher yesterday. Looks like the deal is over.

"We have reached our quota early, and the April promotion is now over. Thank you all for participating." - Brocade

TheNewITGuy

Education

This works too.. just signed up for BCNE and used this code.

it_consultant

dave330i wrote: »

5 days was a little nuts. Managed to adjust my schedule and gave myself 12 days to study.

Have you taken the fiber exam yet?

dave330i

it_consultant wrote: »

Have you taken the fiber exam yet?

Taking it on 23rd.

coty24

Do I have to take the CNE 250 webinar in order to be certified? I just went to Vue.com and it accepted the voucher with no issues. I don't want to pass the exam to find out it's not valid without the webinar. Thanks guys!

it_consultant

Nope, take the test and you will be certified.

coty24

AWESOME!!! - registered!!

Sounds Good

Anyone know the recertification time frame on these? Haven't been able to find anything.

it_consultant

That is a good question, I don't think there is a recert time. Brocade is still feeling out this certification thing for their ethernet business. On the fiber side you are certified for whatever speed the SAN is at. For example, our SAN guy is 1GB fabric certified, the current one is 16 while being certified on 8 is perfectly acceptable.

I wonder how this will play out with their ethernet fabric certs, since that technology is still essentially emerging on the marketplace.

sangkert@my.ibm.com

Hi There,

When will be the next promotion from brocade the get voucher.Can someone help on this

Brocade Certification

Stay connected to us through our social media to learn right away, when we will run another promotion. Nothing is planned right now.

Brocade Certification

Don't be fooled by a low passing score; that means the exam is more difficult. If we set the score higher, the pass rate goes way down.

Brocade Certification

Our policy is not require re-certification. We let the market determine the value of the version of the certificate you hold. Over time, they are less valuable if they are not kept current.

Sounds Good

Brocade Certification wrote: »

Don't be fooled by a low passing score; that means the exam is more difficult. If we set the score higher, the pass rate goes way down.

I disagree with this statement. A low passing score means that less knowledge will need to be acquired in order to pass the test. With a 58% passing rate, you really only have to be well versed in about 50% of the materially and if you guess the rest, you have a good chance of passing.

50% + (100/60)*(60-30)*(.25 on average for the multiple choice if you guess) = 62.5%

I know this is a rough number, but it's certainly a smart way to go about testing in such a short period of time (assuming people only began studying for it the beginning of April when the free vouchers were handed out. 58% is not a good score to be considered passing IMO and doesn't show true understanding of the material presented.

I will post my review of the BCNE in the next post as I have taken it today.

it_consultant

Realistically though, many professional exams hover around the 50-60% mark for passing. Cisco doesn't publish their exam pass threshold but I would be pretty surprised if it were much higher. The point to certification exams is not to get 100% but to pass. You could either make the test very difficult and figure people that really know what they are doing will hit maybe 70% of the questions, or you could make the passing score 95% and make the exam more about how to process the test and having a perfect run.

I could make an exam right now based on BCNE topics that almost every CCNP on this board will fail. Microsoft is famous for that, more people failed the Windows XP test (in the bad old MCSE days) than the server exams. Heck, I almost failed Active Directory and I scored almost perfect on the networking test.

The only way to change this dynamic is to have the exam be 100% lab based, sort of like red hat exams. I would actually prefer to see this approach by Brocade, Cisco, and Microsoft.