Juniper Design Certification

I’ve added a new certification to the resume, JNCDA – Juniper Networks Certified Design Associate.  I’ve always been a big believer in formal learning in my engineering career.   Shortly after after starting to use Juniper gear, I discovered the certification program and related material.  The certification program provided a handy organization of progressively more detailed information on a set of network technologies. Juniper organizes a major certification track from Associate to Specialist to Professional levels. Earning the levels of certification gave me a well organized learning path.  

Design Track

The new design track compliments the specific technology tracks by providing a process on creating new networks and principles for the major aspects that must be considered in network design.  The first Associate level provides a process outline for gathering and interpreting information and creating designs.  As well as, an outline of primary principles for design in the key areas of network architecture, Campus, WAN, Data Center and Security.

As I worked through the Design Fundamentals courseware, I realized that a number of practices that I picked up in project management were concisely applied to the network design process.  I found the organization of the discovery and scoping material helpful in understanding the process of selecting the right architecture.

Each specific area also provided a solid mapping of Juniper implementation technologies to common design problems.  These are reinforced with reference designs and sample RFPs.

Another major consideration in design today are industry regulatory environments.  The courseware outlines where major US regulations like PCI, HIPPA and SOX impact network architecture decisions.  These regulations impact design choices and trade-offs that need to be part of the planning process.

Networks are more important than ever to business operations.  The cost of network downtime creates more and more need for higher reliability.  But the cost of this reliability creates a reverse pressure to the designer.  Balancing the need for high availability, network resiliency and disaster recovery with the cost that these bring to the system is an important skill.  The Design Fundamentals course provides advice on how to approach these design elements under the mantle of Business Continuity.  

Conclusion

I found the outline and courseware for the new JNCDA certification a helpful organization and review on network design and architecture.  Earning this certification reinforced some of the practices I had been naturally following over the last several years.  And provided me with a framework to understand why these are important considerations and a good process for design implementation.

Originally Posted 16-Aug-15 12:20