I need some help.

I am trying to design the most cost effective but stable and secure
network/server setup for an ecommerce app we are building and would
like your suggestions opinions on it in terms of a network setup and
hardware as well.
We are shooting for approximately 100.000 page views/day in 4-5 month
resulting in 5.000 daily transactions. not much budget at this point
something like 13k for the whole thing.

here is a diagram that i am playing around with:

http://geocities.com/arainx/


Questions:

If the isp doesnt provide a router/ is linux router a stable/secure
option?
Does anyone have experience with this product:
http://www.imagestream-is.com/R1_Features.html, what other low cost
options do i have besides for cisco?

If i go the route of building a linux firewall machine what
considerations should i make or leasing watchguard firebox. Can the
firewalling be done at the linux router?

What kind of switch would I need or a hub would do? Could what I am
trying to do be accomplished with 1 linux virtual server (cluster the
webservers together and database for high availability? Is anyone
using coyotepoint e250 or is it too much for this kind of traffic what
about cisco local director? I am planning on leasing those for 12
month.

I am thinking about the following for the mysql db setup:
master mysql on it's own box. 2 switch-controlled-load-balanced app
servers on
their own boxes. each app server runs localhost mysqld as slaves to
the
tcp/ip master. all writes to db go via network to master. all
non-critical
reads (meaning they can be off a little bit) go to localhost slave
which
will get the data pushed to it fairly soon. all critical reads will
be made
directly from master. A question I have is How is the ip takover done
if the master dies? I would want one of the backup slaves to become
the master.

What other methods could I use to make the access secure to this setup
at the colo? ssh? And what terminal server would I need? what am i
missing from this setup?

I really appreciate your input.

A couple of comments:

1. You will see serious performance degradation if you try to run 100,000 sessions a day through a WatchGuard.

2. Cisco is phasing out the Local Director, which means you will have trouble getting support for it, going forward.

As to other things. The ImageStream Rebel Router is a good box, and the company is pretty reliable. Other, less costly, alternatives to Cisco would include Foundry, Riverstone, and 3Com.

Stick with a seperate firewall. 1 Linux box, with a fast processor should be able to handle any rulesets you will want to use.

Always use a switch over a hub. A Cisco 2900 would be my recommendation, although a 1900 will probably do fine (stick with the 2900 if you want to avoid outgrowing the solution).

I prefer load balancing over clustering, but that is a personal preference. CoyotePoint is good, also look at RadWare (http://www.radware.com/).

a MySQL Clustering solution will be fine in this situation, however, you also may want to look at PostgreSQL, for a more Enterprise-level solution.