Major Network design help needed ....

[Aaron Grewell]

> The managers seem convinced that the HP PRocurve 4000M is a "managed" switch with
> various "features". The only things I see it has is "Spanning Tree", VLAN and
> port trunking control.
> 

The feature you want is port mirroring, and as far as I know the 4000M
has it.

> They want a proposal on what to do. New Equipment? Routers at each Unit ?
> 
> Any suggestions out there ?

Put up a mirror port on each switch and get your laptop set up with
NTop.  That will give you a web-based GUI view of the traffic.  From
there you can break down into Ethereal for granularity as needed.  If
the complex has policy in place with any kind of usage limits then start
by enforcing policy.  Unless they're willing to go with a GB backbone
and an uplink upgrade to cover the extra traffic being generated by the
end-users I think you'll have to start with policy enforcement and move
on from there.