Best Practice? - Implementing different sap portals on the same hardware

Question

We have a very large intranet portal implementation today spanning multiple boxes with 30k+ users on it.
A different business group is asking us to build a sap vendor portal system, but would like to know if we can run it on the same equipment.
The intranet uses ldap where the vendor will authenticate/authorize against the database. Aside from this, other configurations will be different. My gut feel is that this is something we should not do (mixing both intranet and vendor systems on the same hardware with different config's).
Is there a best practice document that outlines if this is something that should be done or avoided. Also, if you have run into this and have an answer, would appreciate the feedback.
Thanks in advance for the assistance,
Todd

Answer 1

Hi Todd,
   Technically there isn't a reason you couldn't run both portals on the same hardware assuming it is sized properly. You could even use the same portal if you wanted to.
The thing I would be concerned with is security.  I assume you have more stringent security requirements for external facing applications than internal applications like the need for additional firewalls and reverse proxies.  Usually if you pursue the security requirements you will find the need for separate portal hardware. 
Hope this helps
John