Need helping picking switches

[smbryanfl]

I find myself in uncharted territory here and hope that you can help...

I have a customer that owns a building and rents the individual offices to independent business owners. He has two T1's coming in to the building and feeds two separate circuits. Most all users are on the primary T1 and then a handful of high bandwidth users are on the second circuit.

This is a two story building with the second floor wiring closet above the first floor wiring closet. First story should have 75 offices on the first T1 and 12 on the second. Second floor has 50 offices on the first T1 and 12 on the second. Each office has one connection back to the wiring closet

The problem we are trying to solve:

He has a hodgepodge of hubs and switches in the wiring closet. We have no way of knowing who is using up the bandwidth. We have no way to cap the bandwidth used by one office so often one person starts a huge download that brings the other 100+ people on their circuit to

their knees.

We are looking for a manageable switch solution that will allow us to

monitor and cap the usage of each individual port. It would be nice

to be able to pull the information up from a graphical web page. The

switches should be able to be connected together. Is it possible for

the switches to be grouped together as one unit between floor?

I'm thinking of the following layout:

First T1 - Three 24 port switches first floor - two 24 port switches second floor

Second T1 - One 24 port switch first floor and one twenty four port switch on the second floor

Can you pleae reccomend a Cisco product that fills the needs (cost is a big issue for us)

Steve Bryan

[amritpatek]

Make use of the Cisco Catalyst Switch Solution Finder. This is an easy-to-use tool that can help you identify the right Cisco Catalyst Switch to meet your networking requirements for campus, branch, and data center networks of all sizes.

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/hw/switches/products_promotion0900aecd8050364f.html

[cisconoobie]

Buy 5 or 6 3750G's, one of them with Adv Services for routing. Get a Nice ASA5500 firewall. Setup VLANs, create ACLs to seperate VLANs. Setup InterVlan Routing.

You stack the 3750Gs and manage them as 1 unit, you'll get 36GB Bandwidth for all combined.

Setup QOS on the firewall to police the traffic from certain VLANs. Basically only allow a certain bandwidth for certain vlans to pass the firewall.

Case Closed.

[homewoodcmts]

VLANS (virtual lans) are the way to go.

Almost all cisco switchse will support this.

1. create the VLANS on the router and assign the bandwidth quota to them.

2. Create the same vlans on the switch and assign them to a port or ports on the switch.

done

Monitor by using the vlan statistics on the router or switch.

if you use the same isp for the T1 lines they should be able to bond them so that you can use 1 router and distribute the load equally.

regards,

yodatech