CCDE case studies

CCDE · Put your knowledge to work in context.

The Cisco Certified Design Expert (CCDE) is an advanced certification for network architects who design large-scale, complex networks. Unlike exams that test configuration, the CCDE focuses on requirements analysis, technology selection, and design trade-offs across enterprise, service provider, data center, and security domains. The CCDE case studies are 5 cases and about 4,152 words.

Merging Two Enterprises That Both Claim 10.20.0.0/16

Northwind Health (2,300 staff, 60 sites) has acquired Arbor Diagnostics (1,100 staff, 38 sites). Both companies use 10.0.0.0/8 internally: 214 subnets overlap, including 10.20.0.0/16, which is the primary server VLAN in both.

821 words, about 4 min 2

Hybrid WAN for a 240-Branch Bank With a Hard 400 ms Transaction Budget

Meridian Retail Bank runs 240 branches on an MPLS VPN: 180 small branches at 20 Mbps and 60 larger branches at 100 Mbps. The teller platform, hosted in two data centers, has a hard 400 ms application timeout and is chatty, about 60 round trips per transaction.

864 words, about 4 min 3

iBGP Egress Determinism With Three Providers and Two Route Reflectors

Halcyon Industrial runs 60 sites with two data centers (Dallas and Amsterdam) and three Internet providers: A, a global transit provider with a full table; B, a regional European carrier that is cheaper; and C, an Asian provider with strong local peering. Each data center has eBGP sessions to all three.

826 words, about 4 min 4

PCI Segmentation in a Shared Data Center With a Cloud On-Ramp

Vantage Payments runs a three-pod spine-leaf data center (32 leaves, 40/100G) shared by PCI cardholder-data workloads (300 VMs), corporate IT, and a new container platform. A 10 Gbps dedicated connection to AWS us-east-1 carries 4 TB per day of batch plus an API tier that must fail over within 60 seconds.

834 words, about 4 min 5

Brownfield Automation Across 4,200 Devices With a Unionized Change Process

Corvus Logistics operates 4,200 network devices: 2,100 Cisco IOS-XE switches, 1,400 Juniper MX and SRX platforms, and 700 Fortinet and Meraki devices. Twelve network engineers handle about 9,000 changes per year with a change success rate of 82% and an MTTR of 4.5 hours.

807 words, about 4 min