About the Author

My name is Andrew Ohanian and I have been in network engineering field for about 5 years. I obtained my CCNP-RS back in 2018 and worked as an enterprise engineer at an insurance company from 2018-2021. I recertified my CCNP with the ENCOR exam in April of 2021.

After recertifying my CCNP-EI (previously RS), I realized how much I missed dealing with routing and switching on a day to day basis. Many of my daily tasks on the network team at the insurance company involved managing firewall policies, DNS, F5 load balancing, URL filtering, and troubleshooting database issues that had nothing to do with networking. It was then that I decided to go into the service provider field where routing and switching is the main focus.

By the end of 2021 I earned my JNCIA and JNCIS-SP certifications and joined a regional tier 3 service provider as a network engineer. The Juniper studies allowed me to learn ISIS (a protocol I had never worked with), learn the basics of MPLS, and also see OSPF and BGP in a new light. Becoming "vendor agonistic" allowed me to see the protocols for what they are rather than thinking of them in terms of the Cisco CLI.

In 2022 I began studying for the CCNP-SP. I passed SPRI in May 2022 following this great blog post: https://journey2theccie.wordpress.com/2021/05/03/cisco-300-510-spri-passed-resources-used-exam-thoughts/. My studies mostly came from spending many hours labbing along with the books mentioned in this post.

I then spent the following 6-7 months from June-December studying for SPCOR. I used books, blog posts, random Youtube videos, and Cisco documentation. Throughout the journey, I realized there was a gap in study material for the SPCOR. So I decided to write about each topic as I learned it in a "blogging" style. This was admittedly in large part for my own benefit. I found that trying to "teach" an invisible reader through writing forced me to confront aspects of the technology that I didn't truly know well enough.

In December 2022 I passed SPCOR to earn the CCNP-SP. Throughout this journey I have accumlated dozens of articles that I think could be useful to others studying for this same exam, which is the reason for publishing these online. This "book" is the product of these last six months of studying, and I hope you find some information here useful.

If you have any suggestions, corrections, requests for more articles, or you even want to submit your own articles to be posted here, feel free to reach out and let me know. You can find me here on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-ohanian-972928122/