Juniper or Cisco for Service Provider
CE1028
Posts: 84Member ■■□□□□□□□□
I'd like to become certified in a service provider track. Should I be looking at Cisco or Juniper track?
I'm trying to compare the pros and cons
Juniper
Pros: 3 exams to complete professional level, including JNCIA, compared to 6 exams for Cisco
Cons: not sure how to get hands on practice. Also, can't seem to find any video training available for this track
Cisco
Pros: VIRL allows for hands on practice, video training is available
Cons: 6 exams compared to 3 for Juniper. The exams seem to not have been updated in a long time?
All said, was still leaning towards Cisco, but would love some advice.
I'm trying to compare the pros and cons
Juniper
Pros: 3 exams to complete professional level, including JNCIA, compared to 6 exams for Cisco
Cons: not sure how to get hands on practice. Also, can't seem to find any video training available for this track
Cisco
Pros: VIRL allows for hands on practice, video training is available
Cons: 6 exams compared to 3 for Juniper. The exams seem to not have been updated in a long time?
All said, was still leaning towards Cisco, but would love some advice.
Comments
CBT Nuggets has CCNA SP content, as does INE. INE has content up to CCIE SP level, so that's why I was leaning towards cisco.
I'm also curious is Data Center and SDN technologies play into the SP world as well?
They ain`t wrong I`ve worked in an ISP environment and I meet people from various tier 1 ISP`s and the main vendor they told us to go was Juniper for our core/aggregation and edge. Main reason was that Juniper is much cheaper and they provide good training materials unlike Cisco for their SP track.
Even Juniper says they are #1 in SP
They provide a fast-track program for their JNCIA and all 3 JNCIS certifications which will give you a good jumping point to delve deeper into the SP track. They also release a lot of "This Week" & "Day One" eBooks that cover the topics that you will be tested on.
If you're a Juniper partner you'll also get access to additional training material which most ISPs are to some level.
Everything I've seen on their site seems to require a login. I'm not currently a Juniper customer and i don't work for a partner
https://app.pluralsight.com/profile/author/martin-brown
https://www.cbtnuggets.com/it-training/juniper-training
Yup makes me wonder how Cisco is gonna perform in the SP market within the next 5 years, they have a solid ASR platform but damm the lack of materials other than CCIE bootcamps is sad, especially with 5G coming many telecos gonna shun Cisco hard.
You mean on the learning network? You just need to create a login for it, it's much like the account you make on the Cisco learning network. You don't need to be a customer to create an account.
Their pricing is just crazy. We priced out ASK9Ks vs MX 960s and there was at least a 200k different in the quotes. This was after "heavy" discounts from our account team as well.
I've also had the opportunity to speak with Juniper employees from the training and certification program on multiple occasions and they have been very receptive to all suggestions & comments.
@networker050184, I have cisco ccnp r&s. Do you still recommend cisco sp certification over juniper first?
I've never worked for a service provider, so not sure what to expect. What types of positions are there? I always said I'm interested in layer 2 and above
I don't deal with any of those technologies at my current company though.
Service Provider sounds good as I enjoy routing/switching, but I find I'm not really interested in being a field technician installing circuits
You won`t be a field tech look up IP/MPLS engineer roles thats what the Service provider track is mainly for. As for VMware stuff I myself am looking to pursue this for cloud stuff. I used to be in the ISP world and I don`t think i wanna go back into that.
What was wrong with the ISP world?
Horrible hours along with doing things that that wasen`t IP networking related (look up SDH/DWDM/OTN)
Most of my days were dealing with transmission systems rather than our Cisco ASR platforms.
Depends on your role and the company you work for.
I work in the SP world but the company i work for implements most the projects for 3 SPs. There is a lot of work hands on, lost of consultancy and presales.
There is SDH-DWMDM-OTN but there ir a transmission and access team that specializes on those devices, we just care about the IP part 90% of the time. But this is a matter of the organization.
Off course if you work in the ISP directly is not that fun, usually engineers at the ISP have very limited exposure to do things, or for a small vendor that barely sale.
About the long hours, is true is a pain in the butt the amount of hours and pressure.