How fast is your incoming connection? If you have a data line from the
outside world that can saturate a 100 Mbit network card, you can afford new cards.
We got 2 T1 and 3 ADSL 4mbps lines we're not too worry about the incoming connections, because most of the traffic it's generated inside, we cannot afford changing the whole network structure, that will be changing cisco 10/100mbps switches, routers, nics, wiring infrastructure(we're on Cat5), maybe some server Nics and the boss way of seeing things (the hardest part I think). It WAS a really sucess that the test lab to be approved you know... :)
We have like 200 actively users that generates mails, web based reports, Siebel access, etc. We have had certain bottlenecks on the mailgateways and in the sugarcrm domU's, that's why I am trying to figure it out how to use bonding or even using one dedicated nic for mailgateway, crm, and so on, but we're limited to 3-4 nics per machine.
Any Idea?