VLan OR NO VLan

hi everyone.... here in our organization we have around 400 users spread over in 4 different building close bye and all there 4 building r interconnected to each other with fibre backbone. curntly we have 15 swithes and 9 hubs and of 15 switches only 4 are managable.

now the company is going for expansion and new servers r to be installed and this site is to be connected to 7 differnt other site thru wan.and this will be main site from where other site user will access the servers and internet. so we r going to remove all the hubs and swithes and change them to cisco swithes.

is there any requirment for layer 3 switch...which could be a core switch ?.
should we change all swithes to cisco managable swithes or we should still use the 15 existing swithes ?.
is there any need for vlan..i think there is.....but will the current swithes will give problem when creating v lans...?
which cisco swithes we should go for which model.....?

thanks in advance rahul verma

hey Rahul ...

u said tht ur organization is having aroun 400 users ... do they connect thru a domain controller or wat..???

If u ppl are goin to replace ur old switches with cisco one thts good ... and in future if the latency and broadcast within the network appears u can implement VLAN in such case.

and there is no need of layer 3 switch ... as the wan links which will be terminated to ur end will be ended at the routers. so no worry bout the broadcasts.

and if u want to go for the cisco switches go for 2950 switches they are less expenseive and possesses powerpacked features.

if still u need help get me on snipped-for-privacy@rediffmail.com or snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com

regards

Hitesh Vinzoda Officer - Infrastructure (IT) Icubix Infotech Ltd. A'bad