What kind of networking equipment would you recommend for a set of hosted Web servers, given these circumstances:
Current Situation
- There are two web servers in colocation, in a dedicated closet. This closet is reached by exactly one Gigabit cable.
- The closet has 4U's worth of space, 2U of which are taken by the servers. For now only 1 of those 2 servers is in use - the other one has just been ordered - and there is nothing else in the closet.
- There are 10 or so static, public IP addresses the two servers can use.
What is Needed
- Intrusion prevention. (I guess that means a firewall, but it would be OK to have a solution where the FW is combined with something else (remember, there are only 2U free).)
- Multiplexing the 1 incoming Ethernet connection to the two machines. (I guess that means a switch - but would a router be a better idea?)
- Fault-tolerance of the network equipment, i.e. what happens if the [router / switch / firewall, depending on the question above] goes down? The goal is to offer several 9's of uptime. (No need to worry about fault tolerance of the servers themselves - that is covered separately).
- VPN functionality would also be great, though not mandatory.
What network appliance is best suited to this set of requirements?