How to Get Started in Data Center Networking #networkadmin
The short version: CBT Nuggets' career-training clip on Cisco data center networking is a solid IT-skills primer, but it skips the community costs behind every rack it teaches you to wire.
Our Take
CBT Nuggets is in the business of minting network admins, and their rundown of Cisco Nexus switches and data center topology is exactly what it says on the tin: a career primer for people who want to work inside these buildings. Fair enough — someone has to run the spine-leaf fabric. But watching a data center get framed purely as a technical puzzle, born from an idea and built out with switches and certifications, is a good reminder of how much gets left out of the standard industry pitch.
What's missing is everything before the racks go in: the substation upgrades, the water permits, the tax abatements, the zoning votes that happened in a county meeting most residents never heard about. Every facility this training pipeline is meant to staff sits on top of a deal — with a utility, a municipality, a water authority — and those deals are where the real leverage over your power bill and your local water table gets decided, long before anyone's configuring a VLAN.
We're glad the industry needs skilled hands. We just think the people living next to these buildings deserve the same clarity about how they got there as the engineers wiring them up. Check our facility map to see what's been approved near you, and if you want to push for more transparency in these deals, our take-action page is a good place to start.
This is GridWatch the USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of CBT Nuggets, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.