Cisco Routing and Switching Sales Cheat Sheet

Audience:

Implementers or Administrators of Cisco routers and switches including the Catalyst switches, CRS routers, and the ISR (Integrated Services Router) series of routers

Candidates for CCNA, CCNP, or CCIE, Routing and Switching certifications

Market Opportunities:

The CCNA classes are the most popular Cisco classes across all learning partners, but make up a very small part of Fast Lane’s business. Lots of opportunity for us to grow this part of the business.

The high-end routing courses are geared towards service provider customers, so ask your service provider customers if they need training on Cisco CRS routers.

Competitive Landscape:

This part of the Cisco learning market, especially CCNA training, is highly competitive as virtually every learning partner offers it. There are some companies that focus solely on the R&S certification classes.

What is Routing and Switching?

The router is the first device made by Cisco. In the simplest terms a router “routes” traffic between different networks. In your home you probably have a router that routes traffic from your home network (computers, phones on wifi, roku, apple TV, etc) to the internet. In a corporate environment there are likely to be multiple internal networks (accounting network, engineering network, IP phone network, wifi network, etc) that need to talk to each other and communicate over a WAN (or internet); this requires a router.

Switches, in their simplest form, connect devices together that are on the same network. Any network traffic that is going between two devices on the same network, only needs to go through a switch, a router is not required until traffic needs to go to a device on a different network. You may hear switches referred to as layer 2 (transport layer) devices and routers as layer 3 (network layer) devices. Layer 2 devices forward traffic based on a MAC address that is a physical address statically assigned to every network device. Layer 3 devices forward traffic based on IP addresses that are logical addresses assignable by an administrator.

In today’s environment, there are very few devices that are only layer 2 devices. In Cisco’s current product line, even though a product may be called a switch, it can still perform layer 3 traffic forwarding decisions that fall into the traditional definition of a router. For the purpose of Cisco’s product line, its best to think of a switch as a device that performs the function of a traditional switch, but also routes traffic between separate INTERNAL networks. Routers will typically only be implemented at the edge of the network, or where internal traffic will be

Cisco Routing and Switching Sales Cheat Sheet

routed to the internet or over some other network provided by a 3rd party, such as a service provider, or in other words, between INTERNAL and EXTERNAL networks.

Certifications: For CCNA (entry-level) and CCNP (professional level) Routing and Switching certifications, we have a class that matches to each of the exams. However, it is not required that students take the class before sitting for the exam. The CCNA certification classes are by far the most popular classes that Cisco sells, however, they make up a very small part of Fast Lane’s business. This is a area where we have a lot of opportunity to grow our business.

CCNA R&S Exams:

100-101 ICND1 (Interconnecting Cisco Networking Devices Part 1)*AND200-101 ICND2 (Interconnecting Cisco Networking Devices Part 2)

OR

200-120 CCNAX (Interconnecting Cisco Networking Devices Accelerated)

*Passing the INCD1 exam will give the test taker an entry level certification called CCENT

CCNP R&S Exams (All 3 Required):

300-101 ROUTE (Implementing Cisco IP Routing)300-115 SWITCH (Implementing Cisco IP Switched Networks)300-135 TSHOOT (Troubleshooting and Maintaining Cisco IP Networks)

CCIE R&S: For candidates to become CCIE certified, they must take a written exam and a practical hands-on lab exam. Fast Lane offers two instructor led workshops as well as self-paced lab exercises through the CCIE 360 Program

Bootcamps: CCIE 360 R&S Bootcamp 1 (CIERS1)CCIE 360 R&S Bootcamp 2 (CIERS2)

Self-paced Lab Prep:CCIE 360 R&S Self Study Preferred Package (CIERSBASIC)

IPv6:

There are two IP addressing standards used today. The legacy IPv4 is what most people are familiar with. IPv4 addresses look something like this: 192.168.0.1. This scheme has worked fine for many years, but because so many devices are now being connected to a network, we are being limited by mathematical limit of the number of IPv4 addresses that are available (4,294,967,296 or 2^32 addresses). The IPv6 standard has been around since 1998, but as of

Cisco Routing and Switching Sales Cheat Sheet

May 2014, only 4% of internet traffic used IPv6. IPv6 uses a much longer IP address represented with hexadecimal digits such as 2001:0db8:85a3:0042:1000:8a2e:0370:7334 allowing for 2^128 addresses, or 7.9 x 10^28 more than IPv4. This addressing scheme should allow for the ever-growing number of connected devices. Cisco offers these classes that relate to IPv6:

Cisco IPv6 Fundamentals, Design & Deployment (IP6FD)Implementing IPv6 Solutions for Service Providers (IPV6SPSE)*

*Developed by Fast Lane

Service Provider Routing:

Service providers such as Comcast and AT&T usually have much different routing requirements that a typical enterprise customer. Service providers need routers that are capable of handling all of the internet traffic for an entire city or region. This requires a device with a lot of processing power and network bandwidth. Cisco’s answers for this type of customer are the XR 12000 series routers, the ASR 9000 series router and the top-of-the-line CRS routers (CRS1 being the original CRS and the CRS3 being the 2nd and current generation CRS). To give you an idea of the scale of these products, a single line card for a CRS router can cost over $1mil. A CRS1 router has enough bandwidth to support a simultaneous phone call made by every man, woman, and child in China. The ASR 9000 is the newest product in the service provider routing portfolio. The ASR 9000 is designed for video and other high bandwidth applications. It is meant to replace the older GSR and 7600 series routers. The XR 12000 series, the CRS series, and the ASR 9000 series routers use a modified Cisco operating system called IOS XR. Cisco offers the following courses on the 12000 series, the CRS series, and the IOS XR operating system:

Cisco CRS-1 Carrier Routing System Essentials (CRS1E)Cisco CRS-3 Carrier Routing System Essentials (CRS3E)Cisco XR 12000 Series Essentials (XR12KE)Cisco Aggregation Services Router 9000 Series Essentials (ASR9KE)Cisco Carrier Routing Systems Product Enhancements (CCRSPE)Implementing and Maintaining Cisco Technologies Using IOS XR (IMTXR)Deploy, Maintain, and Troubleshoot Cisco IOS XR (DMTXR)