Well August has come and gone but there wasn’t any announcements from Cisco in regards to CCIE lab changes for January 2009.  This means that we “should” be clear until June/July 2009.  Now it’s possible that they announce in October or November as opposed to the traditional month of August.

The only possible big changes were in regards to the Security lab equipment which we blogged about earlier this year and some minor changes to the Service Provider lab in regards to IPv6.  The Voice lab is planning to change around the June/July 2009 time frame.

So what does this mean by Cisco not making any lab announcements?  It doesn’t mean that they aren’t changing the labs.  We could see changes to the tasks presented in the labs but within the current blueprint and hardware specifications.  This can be done by putting less emphasis on a traditionally important topic (e.g. Frame Relay) and more emphasis on other topics (e.g. QoS, IP Services, etc).   Changes like this (less Frame Relay and more QoS) would be in line with what we are seeing in the real world.

On a personal note I should have done the Storage Lab before they updated the Storage Lab Hardware in July as now it’s really expensive.  I’m not sure of the exact list price but it’s somewhere in the 6 figures.   I have to get it out of the way before the Wireless Lab comes out