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According to me, both CCIE and SDN are evenly important. Let’s first gain the basic idea of both first:
CCIE is expert level certification where the candidates gain the expertise in designing, implementing and troubleshooting the enterprise level of networks. The CCIE is going to give you the magic of CCIE number for which every network engineer have the dreams. Moreover, the CCIE R&S certification is going to open up the path for the further CCIE Certifications as well. There’s a lot of scope in CCIE in 2018 for both fresher as well as the experienced people. The CCIEs are always in demand and the IT companies, like the Cisco, TCS, Orange, HCL, Infosys, Accenture, Aricent, Tech Mahindra, HP, Wipro, etc., are always ready to welcome the CCIE certified professionals with open arms.
SDN Certification:
Whereas, if I talk about the SDN it is still considered an emerging technology which is going to promises lots of things in the future. It has been attracting much attention from the service providers and IT industries. It has a great scope and offers numerous some of which are, automated load balancing, streamlined physical infrastructure, on-demand provisioning, and the ability to scale network resources in lockstep with application and data needs. Nevertheless, it does not seem to be employed anytime soon by every IT networking company. And that is because of the complexities which are attached to it and expertise required implementing it. Also, all the underlying hardware is also needed to be replaced before SDN can be implemented.
CCIE V.S. SDN:
Frankly speaking, the SDN has no comparison with the Cisco CCIE Routing and Switching. The CCIE course is going to cover, the networking technologies concepts, and various protocols like OSI model, STP, VLAN, VTP, TCP/IP, BGP, MPLS, ACL, NAT, OSPF, EIGRP, and other basics of network security. While the SDN is not going to teach you any such concepts compared to the CCIE. There is a possibility, that soon the Cisco will release another version of CCIE maybe Version 6 and is going to make the SDN, a part of it. If you will go through the Cisco website, you will find that they have not launched any certification related to SDN. Cisco’s new version of CCIE Data Centre Certification is focused on the Cisco ACI which is going to be their SDN offering.
The answer to your next question that whether it will be still worthy to gain the CCIE, my answer is Yes, because of the following reasons:
1. The usage of the Classical networking technologies will still be needed for many such years to come. The SDN solutions are making the ground but still, they need to mature over many years in order to finally achieve the dominance.
2. Cisco traditionally sells the hardware but has responded to the threat of SDN by rebranding themselves as the software company as well.
3. The Classical networking technologies are going to becoming smarter through the advent of the Network Programmability and maturing APIs that they would enable to do more and integrate with other technologies.
4. Cisco Systems besides offering their own SDN also support the OpenFlow SDN protocol on their switching devices. For example, their offering of Cisco Nexus Data Broker heavily relies on OpenFlow support.
5. In the Virtualised and Cloud driven environments, Virtual networking devices are still much popular. Cisco has the several virtual networking offerings like CSR 1000v, Nexus 1000v, ASAv.
6. The Companies that decide to start deploying the SDN solutions are still going to need to maintain their classical network platforms that might in some instances act as an under-laying infrastructure for the SDN’s overlay.
SDN will be worth learning but CCIE as a certification still has its worth and if you are planning to pursue CCIE, you could gain the help of SPOTO CCIE Club , for better results.
