Design questions...

["Jeremy Finke" <Jeremy.Finke () MeridianIQ com>]

Hi, I have some performance questions that I hope that someone would be
able to help me out with. 
I am trying to convince my boss to start implementing snort at a serious
level. Problem is, he is a windows/closed source type of guy and I am a
unix/open source type of guy. I am trying to convince him to buy
seperate boxes for each of the sensors and then a logging box that has
its own private network to send data across. Ideally, I would have 4
snort sensors and one of them be an ACID/PHP/MySQL log server. He does
not want to pay for all the boxes because he thinks that they are going
to cost $2.5k a pop. I think that we can go with a non major vendor
(pogo linux, penguin computing, etc....) and get it cheaper, but that is
a different story. 
So, he brought up the idea of having one big box and having multiple
nics. Now, I know that this can easily be done using multiple snort
processes/conf files/etc... However, I am wondering about the
performance of such a beast. What type of horsepower do I need to
monitor 2 T1s (on seperate networks) and 2 100MB networks (also
seperate)? Also, it will probably be running the database as well, on a
seperate network. Can people give me an idea of what they are running
out there? 
Thanks! 
Jeremy Finke