I have a bunch of servers, each with 2+ NIC's, and want to set things up so that some of the servers can only talk to each other on a private network (a backbone), and others can talk to each other privately but also have access to the "public" network.

I'm doing this to prevent network bottlenecks.

So it would look like this:

Machine 1 - eth0 talks to public, eth1 talks to private
Machine 2 - eth0 talks to public, eth1 talks to private
Machine 3 - eth1 can only talk to private
Etc.

Can this be done with a single PowerConnect 2716? If not, can anyone recommend a router that can help me achieve this?

Thanks!