How to get started on being a network engineer

[alkemyst]

You've got some good info in this post. Cisco really needs to get going and update itself or it's going to be sitting on the sidelines watching every other vendor take the spotlight. Their prices are too high and don't offer near as much with it as some of the other vendor's are now. The only places that I see still using cisco gear is because they've always used cisco gear.

Without qualifying this statement it doesn't mean much.

Sure a 6500 series chassis is far too expensive for a small doctor's office, but a 2960 or 3750/3850/3560 could be seen as viable. Small business is not a Cisco market day to day though. They are really medium to large business vendors.

The price you are really paying is for support. With SmartNET you get access to 24/7 engineers and can have a new piece of gear in your hands as fast as 4 hours.

We are a multi-vendor company, in the route and switch market our customers favor Cisco whether it's green-field or replacing Dell/HP/Brocade/etc in an existing setup.

For firewalls and IPS, the favor has been going to other vendors like Palo Alto for one. Pricing and performance are much better and the support is there.

Cisco phones are pretty much a standard. Stuff like ShoreTel and the like just don't work like them.

Cisco Call Manager is excellent.

If you need ultra Low-Latency switching, the Nexus line up is hard to beat...uber expensive, but the tool for the job.

It really depends on size and revenue/profitability of a company to know what is a good fit.

 

[Zargon]

Virtualization is a game changer. systems and network admins are blending quickly. The reasons being is that the concepts of servers virtualization flow into the concepts of SDN. Software virtualization is easier, cheaper and less time consuming than dealing with the physical. Systems virtualization just happened much quicker but I know in my day to day systems functions, I had to learn alot about networking as vsphere incorporates alot of networking into it's functions.

Once SDN really comes to market, the networking side is going to change. I haven't studied alot on cisco stuff in the last few years because I haven't had to use it but a more general approach would be better as the concepts are the same for networking but cisco does use a few of it's own terms but those are easily learned.

The one thing you need to be open to if you want to learn in IT related fields is be OPEN to continually learning new concepts. Always be reading or practicing with something new. It's definitely a good idea to have a small lab either at work or at home that you can practice on so when you break it, you can fix it without affecting anything else. Some of the best learning techniques comes from breaking something and learning what it takes to fix it.

this is simply my opinion

its going to be YEARS before SDN is a a huge worry, its still very new, and very very buggy tech. it will take years before CIO's at traditional big business are going to say 'put that in our core NOW"

but I work in Higher Ed. we are multivendor, and until this summer hadn't had a real amount of any cisco hardware in a decade. and we still wont be using it at the edge at all.

even when SDN takes off, you still need to know how to push packets yourself, and how routing and switching works


MS Cert's for a network professional are a joke.

learn to script. I suck at it, and it makes my job harder. python is still king.



my path

I went from computer lab babysitter, to help desk, to ISP tech support desk jockey, to doing low level networking and server stuff, to being a server and net admin, and finally ditching server stuff altogether and going to pushing packets full time

I have ZERO cert's. though I could easily have a net+ and CCNA(have the books, aced test exams, never got around to taking the tests) but I was already gainfully employed and running a small network



more opinion

the lower level support tech jobs are good starters because you get to work on everything, and you can cozy up to the higher ups and get a bigger/better taste(and you should, so you can get the tier 2 and 3 promotions) and get the special side work learning more advanced stuff, and hopefully get sucked in a department you like

 

[Zargon]

Without qualifying this statement it doesn't mean much.

Sure a 6500 series chassis is far too expensive for a small doctor's office, but a 2960 or 3750/3850/3560 could be seen as viable. Small business is not a Cisco market day to day though. They are really medium to large business vendors.

The price you are really paying is for support. With SmartNET you get access to 24/7 engineers and can have a new piece of gear in your hands as fast as 4 hours.

We are a multi-vendor company, in the route and switch market our customers favor Cisco whether it's green-field or replacing Dell/HP/Brocade/etc in an existing setup.

For firewalls and IPS, the favor has been going to other vendors like Palo Alto for one. Pricing and performance are much better and the support is there.

Cisco phones are pretty much a standard. Stuff like ShoreTel and the like just don't work like them.

Cisco Call Manager is excellent.

If you need ultra Low-Latency switching, the Nexus line up is hard to beat...uber expensive, but the tool for the job.

It really depends on size and revenue/profitability of a company to know what is a good fit.

ciscos prices are terrible(you are correct, small-med is not their game, they are way over priced and under gunned there, unless you need T1 type stuff), and TAC is pretty decent but far from amazing. only really rated well because other TAC's are terrible(HP). Brocade is mediocre, Juniper is better than the last 2

Yap, if someone aspiration is to start at minimum wage and get to $40,000 at the age of 50 it is a perfect approach. :thumbsup:

however special I would love to think I am, I am not. Im above average technically at best, and better at soft skills. I started at 22. Im 32 and I make significantly more than 40K. And where I live isn't that expensive to live either.

none of the help desk jobs I see anymore are minimum wage, not that ~16$/hr is huge but its double minimum wage, and that's local to me, which again, is cheaper. Chicago pays more.

 

[alkemyst]

ciscos prices are terrible(you are correct, small-med is not their game, they are way over priced and under gunned there, unless you need T1 type stuff), and TAC is pretty decent but far from amazing. only really rated well because other TAC's are terrible(HP). Brocade is mediocre, Juniper is better than the last 2

I have never found Cisco's TAC on R&S to be less than perfect.

Juniper tries to promise in the R&S market on things they can't deliver.

 

[imagoon]

Cisco might be high priced, but a) if you are paying retail with them, you are doing it wrong and b) it is the only gear that I can cosistently find that 1 random switch or router with 5-7 years of up time. Other than Juniper (which is priced to compete with Cisco) it is rare to find anything that just works like Cisco gear does. Hell even their SMB line is starting to become a fantastic product at the small business end.

 

[grendel19]

what's something more network?

No offense, but you really need to do your own research if you have to ask this. If you're looking for a network path, you should at least know the vendors of network products. Clearly, Cisco isn't the only player out there.

Cisco might be high priced, but a) if you are paying retail with them, you are doing it wrong and b) it is the only gear that I can cosistently find that 1 random switch or router with 5-7 years of up time. Other than Juniper (which is priced to compete with Cisco) it is rare to find anything that just works like Cisco gear does. Hell even their SMB line is starting to become a fantastic product at the small business end.

We recently purchased over 200k worth of Cisco switches. Our Cisco/VAR reps matched all HP pricing we were quoted. And I don't mean the crappy Procurves, but the 3Com/Comware models. I've been at my current job for a year and a half, and I've already had 5+ Procurves fail on me.

Cisco in general is more expensive, but with volume, timing of the fiscal year, aggressiveness of your sales rep, their pricing can be competitive.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Dell is pretty good for the price too. I'm really happy with my dell switch at home and I'd buy another if I needed to. Cisco/Juniper is the cat's ass but you pay a high premium for that. Not everyone has the option to buy at a discounted price.

 

[sactwnguy]

I would not call Brocades data center switches mediocre. If I had to choose between Brocades VDX fabric switches and Cisco Nexus I would go VDX unless the servers were UCS. They are easier to manage and cost about 30% less.

 

[kevnich2]

Dell is pretty good for the price too. I'm really happy with my dell switch at home and I'd buy another if I needed to. Cisco/Juniper is the cat's ass but you pay a high premium for that. Not everyone has the option to buy at a discounted price.

Most people I know don't understand why I went this way but we have a large amount of dell switches and for our company and size, they work just fine and fit our budget nicely. For the price difference, I bought a few extras and keep them configured and ready to swap in just in case, and still had money left over. Been several years and have only lost two switches following major lightning storms.

 

[imagoon]

Most people I know don't understand why I went this way but we have a large amount of dell switches and for our company and size, they work just fine and fit our budget nicely. For the price difference, I bought a few extras and keep them configured and ready to swap in just in case, and still had money left over. Been several years and have only lost two switches following major lightning storms.

What is funny here is Cisco came in and beat the Dell quotes. The newer Cisco "Small Business" switches are actually pretty fantastic for any place I would think about dropping a Dell switch.

SG500X stack up to 8 units with 10gig support which handles a lot of areas really well.

 

[Demo24]

Cisco might be high priced, but a) if you are paying retail with them, you are doing it wrong and b) it is the only gear that I can cosistently find that 1 random switch or router with 5-7 years of up time. Other than Juniper (which is priced to compete with Cisco) it is rare to find anything that just works like Cisco gear does. Hell even their SMB line is starting to become a fantastic product at the small business end.

I use their SMB line at all my locations now. Perfect uptime, easy to install/configure (I don't need it to do much), and more than fast enough for what my sites do. Been very happy with them, especially for the price. :thumbsup:

Worlds better than the procurve, 3com, netgear, combos I found out there. D:

 

[drebo]

What is funny here is Cisco came in and beat the Dell quotes. The newer Cisco "Small Business" switches are actually pretty fantastic for any place I would think about dropping a Dell switch.

SG500X stack up to 8 units with 10gig support which handles a lot of areas really well.

What's funny is that the SG300 series is identical hardware to the PowerEdge 3000 series. Cisco's firmware is head and shoulders above Dell's, though.

Dell switches are buggy and unreliable if you're doing any sort of management on them.

I prefer Cisco Catalyst for switches, Juniper for routers, and Palo Alto or Juniper for firewalls. If I absolutely have to use a lower end switch, SG300s are what I use, but they're shit.

Dell 6224s have a 6mb buffer FOR THE ENTIRE SWITCH. That should tell you about the rest of their lineup and how shit they are. Don't use Dell switches.

 

[imagoon]

What's funny is that the SG300 series is identical hardware to the PowerEdge 3000 series. Cisco's firmware is head and shoulders above Dell's, though.

Dell switches are buggy and unreliable if you're doing any sort of management on them.

I prefer Cisco Catalyst for switches, Juniper for routers, and Palo Alto or Juniper for firewalls. If I absolutely have to use a lower end switch, SG300s are what I use, but they're shit.

Dell 6224s have a 6mb buffer FOR THE ENTIRE SWITCH. That should tell you about the rest of their lineup and how shit they are. Don't use Dell switches.

You are bit all over the board here. SG300 yes is the smallest one of SMB line. SG500X line is actually pretty damn stable as user end point switches. I have several stacks of 7 of them for user workstations and they have been running without issue.

Poweredge is a server I am assuming you mean Powerconnect 3000 series, the problem is that the 3x00 of those switches are generations. In our tiny offices we have quite a few Powerconnect 3548P units and they are pretty stable (as in the problem has never been a switch problem barring the lightning strike we had at one of the small offices). At the same time I just got done taking a bat to the 5324/5348 series we had because the management engines crashed pretty much weekly. I want to do the same with the craptastic 2600 series switches we have running around.

Dell is perfectly fine if you get the correct line for your use case. For us 35xx are fantastic and have uptimes and runtimes at the same level as Cisco stuff. I prefer the warrenty on the Cisco stuff though so I have been pushing people that direction and the SG500 line is stable in a 8 unit stack where the 3500 series has oddness there.

 

[Zargon]

I have never found Cisco's TAC on R&S to be less than perfect.

Juniper tries to promise in the R&S market on things they can't deliver.

R&S? Sorry I am not sure what you mean by that

I haven't dealt with Cisco tac on anything outside of a small place, couple VXR7206's and some 2811 and 2911's

I wasn't impressed at all, took multiple calls and emails to get them to even understand what I was asking. but it was small beans, and talking to people with VERY heavy accents with some language barrier issues


Juniper promises a lot they cannot deliver :\

Cisco might be high priced, but a) if you are paying retail with them, you are doing it wrong and b) it is the only gear that I can cosistently find that 1 random switch or router with 5-7 years of up time. Other than Juniper (which is priced to compete with Cisco) it is rare to find anything that just works like Cisco gear does. Hell even their SMB line is starting to become a fantastic product at the small business end.

yeah we pay no where close to retail. Our older cisco stuff has been rock solid, ask me in a year how I like the nexus 7k's

our real winners for old stuff with uptime is old foundry gear, rock rock rock solid.

We recently purchased over 200k worth of Cisco switches. Our Cisco/VAR reps matched all HP pricing we were quoted. And I don't mean the crappy Procurves, but the 3Com/Comware models. I've been at my current job for a year and a half, and I've already had 5+ Procurves fail on me.

Cisco in general is more expensive, but with volume, timing of the fiscal year, aggressiveness of your sales rep, their pricing can be competitive.

I spent 5 times that already this year on procurve. our failure rate is almost zero. 120k+ switchports of procurve. 5400 series. rock solid. and of course the warranty cannot be beat.

I would not call Brocades data center switches mediocre. If I had to choose between Brocades VDX fabric switches and Cisco Nexus I would go VDX unless the servers were UCS. They are easier to manage and cost about 30% less.

I am fond of the VDX's we have

 

[Spineshank]

R&S = Routing and Switching.


In my experience, Cisco will do its darnest to get in the door. So if you get quoted higher than a competitor, if you go back and say I got this quote from XX, they will almost always come in lower.

 

[Zargon]

R&S = Routing and Switching.


In my experience, Cisco will do its darnest to get in the door. So if you get quoted higher than a competitor, if you go back and say I got this quote from XX, they will almost always come in lower.

1. duh. I was thinking like an industry section for some reason and totally blanking

2. yeah where I work that's not OK to do. I would get fired. they finally gave us a big discount because they were tired of not winning bids

 

[fyb3r]

Yap, if someone aspiration is to start at minimum wage and get to $40,000 at the age of 50 it is a perfect approach. :thumbsup:

Its how I started... 25 currently and making 45k without a cert, though im a test away from getting my MCSA at which point mu company will pay for the OSCP and then CISSP and increase my pay 10-15k each round.

Its really not all that hard. The help desk just gets you immersed in it and helps you to apply what it is you are learning, thus making it stick more.


And that isnt including the security audit's ill get hired for on the side so its really close to 60k a year currently.