Overview of DCICN

The CCNA Data Center has finally revised! This certification has lunged from version 1 to version 6. The CCNA Data Center is still made up of two exams you must pass. These exams have no prerequisites.  This post focuses on the new Introducing Cisco Data Center Networking (DCICN) exam.

The Old DCICN Exam

Are you interested in squeaking out the old DCICN exam? Its number is 640-911 and your last day to test is April 11, 2017. If you are interested in my training course for this exam, it can be found here at CBT Nuggets until it retirement.

This “old” exam featured these major sections and exam percentages:

1.0 Describe How a Network Works (15%)
2.0 Configure, Verify and Troubleshoot a Switch with VLANs and Interswitch Communications Using Nexus (21%)
3.0 Implement an IP Addressing Scheme and IP Services to Meet Network Requirements in a Medium-Size Enterprise Branch Office Network Using Nexus (12%)
4.0 Configure, Verify, and Troubleshoot Basic Router Operation and Routing on Cisco Devices Using Nexus (52%)

The New DCICN Exam

The new exam features these major sections and exam percentages:

1.0 Data Center Physical Infrastructure (15%)
2.0 Basic Data Center Networking Concepts (23%)
3.0 Advanced Data Center Networking Concepts (23%)
4.0 Basic Data Center Storage (19%)
5.0 Advanced Data Center Storage (20%)

What was removed from the old exam to the new and what was added? Here are the biggest areas:

Removed:

• Removed product-specific elements, such as Nexus, and instead increased the focus on skills and technologies
• Removed Ethernet low-level functionality and added operational roles of data center devices; for example, use cases to deploy various types of physical devices
• Removed Cisco IOS router topics
• Removed specifications of platform components as in boot process procedures, passwords, and diagnostics

Added or Changed:

• Increased breadth of data center networking concepts including First Hop Redundancy Protocols (FHRP), data center networking architectures such as spine-and-leaf designs, unicast and multicast, and authentication, authorization, and accounting (AAA) concepts and filtering
• Additional focus on high-availability switching concepts, port channel, virtual Port Channel (vPC), and control plane and data plane separation
• Increased data center storage concepts including Fiber Channel operations and design, IP storage protocols, and moved storage topics from DCICT into DCICN
• Added basic understanding of Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE)

In the next post – I will provide you with the complete topic list for this new DCICN exam!