What is the Best Hardware Configuration

Friends,

We are planning to setup webservers,Mailservers,database servers,Firewalls.

The webserver is going to be used for B2C transactions.We are expecting 500 hits per day intially.

1. What is the best hardware configuration for this??(IBM/HP/DELL..etc)

2.What kind of load balancing to be used??
(When we get unexpected Hits..)

3.What kind of Firwalls(Software/Hardware) to be used??

4.what’s your option in Database/Webserver/Transaction processing/Secured Servers?

Thank you..