Then you need to get rid of that '90's antique web server and get something modern. When you say "interrupt-bound hardware," all you are doing is showing that you're not familiar with modern servers and quality operating systems that are designed to mitigate things like DDoS attacks.
"Modern" servers? IP is processed in the kernel on web servers, regardless of OS. Have you configured a kernel lately? Noticed there are ~3,000 lines in the Linux config file alone? _Lots_ of device drivers in there, which are interrupt driven and have to be timeshared. No servers I know do realtime processing (RT kernels don't) or process IP in ASICs. What configurations of Linux / BSD / Solaris / etc does web / email / ntp / sip / iptables / ipfw / ... and doesn't have issues with kernel locking? Test it on your own servers by mounting a damaged DVD on the root directory, and dd'ing it to /dev/null. Notice how the ATA/SATA/SCSI driver impacts the latency of everything on the system. How would you replicate that on a firmware and ASIC drive appliance? Roger Marquis