Unless your farmer has >$5M in assets, the estate tax does not apply to him. And the reason behind the estate tax is to avoid the increasing accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few. Whether or not the government is incompetent at handling the cash is besides the point.

$50k for something that performs at $150k? And that's for a LB that saturates a 10GB line with full SSL acceleration. That's not trivial to do, and most sites wouldn't even come close to using that. In that case, I'd recommend Intel/AMD gear.

I've used the Zeus software. Never got trained on it, and had it up and running in less that 2 hours. Its really well designed.

Done and done... $50k and equivalent performance of the high end BIGIP stuff
http://www.zeus.com/news/press_articles/zeus-price-performance-press-release.html