Protecting the server farm!

[WALI <hkhasgiwale () gmail com>]

I have been wondering about the technology means that I can deploy into my 
infrastructure which is yet at only the designing stage.
In a newly designed campus infrastructure, I'll have a datacenter with two 
core switches to which will my IDFs be connected with a 10 gig uplink.

From my core, I plan to directly connect my 50 odd servers.
Various vendors are telling various things.

Cisco gives a solution which has a switch containing Firewall and IDS built 
into it that would sit between my servers and core switches.
Foundry gives a solution where they propose a united threat management 
(UTM) box sitting between my servers and core switch with all internal 
traffic being diverted through it.
Nortel says no need, buy a NAC solution later and your whole network will 
be well protected.

What do you guys think? Each solution has an added costs and tends to bring 
about a bottleneck reducing throughput off my server farm to only a gigabit 
as most of these devices cannot give me more than a Gbit interface.

How do you guys protect your server farm from internal LAN threats?


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