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thelink12

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Switch bandwidth bottlenect

So I am working at a clients office and he has a 48 port patch panel which is pretty full, connecting to PC's with Gigabit NICS.  24 of the cables are connected to a small Cisco SR202 switch and the other 24 are connected to a similar switch.  Both Gigabit.  This is where it gets wacky.  He has one cable from each of the Cisco switches plugged into a 48 port HP Procurve switch which has one cable connected to the firewall.  I am trying to get him to lose the two Cisco switches in the middle but I want to know the verbiage when he asks why.  Having 24 ports using a single Cat5 cable as a "trunk" does not make sense to me.  I have been too long out of the switch world to give him a good answer.  Check out my crude diagram attached.
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Predrag Jovic
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If 48 port HP Procurve switch is L3 switch and cables are good quality (good cat 5e cable (especially short ones) can handle gigabit speeds), current network design is OK. Anyway, you can replace cat 5e cables with cat 6 cables (I would do that for sure).

Cisco standard design recommendation is 20 hosts on one uplink (that's what you have in topology). If HP Procurve is not working as L3 switch that most likely could be issue since firewalls usually don't have good routing capabilities (even if firewall have good routing capabilities, that would still be much worse than capabilities for interVLAN routing of decent L3 switch).
One other thought - do the Cisco switches provide any sort of PoE? If they do, and the HP doesn't, then the Cisco's are going to need to stay put.
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thelink12

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The Procurve is a 2810, layer 2.  I also just found out that there are some cameras in the office which are streaming about 15 Megabits to the persons desk who monitors them.
No POE.  I am drawing a blank, how would a L3 switch help out?  Just to create two separate VLANS?  I apologize, it has been years since I had to do this.
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Predrag Jovic
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Thanks. I have been reading up on this as well. The network is a bowl of spaghetti I need to untangle. For instance, the DC was pulling 15-20 Mbps all day and I am not for sure. Will definitely VLAN the video. Thanks.