MT in a large hosting environment?

Hi everyone, I have been researching possible solutions for my network for a long time now, and I think I’ve finally found the right one that can do everything we need it to do. But I’d still like to ask. Here is the situation:

current network:
internet gigabit fiber connection ==> Cisco 5500 ==> servers
multiple \24 public IP spaces
all servers must use the public IP space
servers are running web servers/game servers, theres a few dns servers and mail servers too.

I am looking into MT doing some basic firewalling (port blocking, scan preventing and such). My situation is that I must have these servers accessible on their public IPs and I do not want to create a private network and then NAT the public spaces to the private network as there are always IPs and servers added/removed and it would be a hassle to have to change NAT all the time.

I have read all posts relating to similar situations on the forum and I’m pretty sure MT can handle this, just not sure exactly how. I read something about bridging where the traffic is filtered through the MT and the firewall rules apply but the servers keep their public IP space, also 1-to-1 NAT might help.

What I’m wondering is how can I apply MT to my situation, I would build a very nice dual-CPU, lots of RAM system for MT to handle all the traffic that comes in, would it be able to handle large amounts of traffic in such a setup?

I would also like to use the bandwidth monitoring features, but its not absolutely necessary as I can monitor this individually on each server through SNMP.

Thanks to whoever can provide some insight into this, I was going to ask sales@mikrotik but decided to post this here instead.

We use Mikrotik routers in our data center with only routing, no nat. You can apply firewall rules either way - obviously its way faster without having to use NAT. We have 2 gigabit handoffs from Level3 and the Mikrotik handles them perfectly. Intel Pro 1000 nics for both outside connections. We’ve sustained a 80mbps smurf icmp attack for about 16 hours without crashing the router or slowing unblocked traffic. We had to rearrange rules to optimize for the attack, but it handled it.

I’m very impressed with Mikrotik and would recommend it anytime for a hosting environment. Outperforms many of the cisco boxes we used to have. Just my thoughts.

Sam