We're going through right now and putting NetOptics taps on our critical links. They're passive devices that introduce no delay to the traffic. Supposedly (not tested) the device can lose power and traffic still passes. The benefit of network taps is that usually they pass layer 1 and 2 errors through, whereas a hub would normally drop that as soon as the trasmitter attempts to transmit it. We have a few 1000BaseSX links that we plan on monitoring with these. The tap can handle the load as it's not doing anything. However, you will need to make sure the IDS/IPS solution can handle that load.