[Bwa]

We're mostly a Mac shop with some Windows clients. We're on a budget, and I recently noticed Sun has a Netra 1 server for $995. We need to be able to browse file shares from Windows and Mac OS 9 and X machines (so we need Samba and netatalk). We also need CVS support.

We have a few Sun machines already...The Xserve is kinda expensive for what we'd use it for.

Anyone try this before? Any experiences with the low end Sun hardware?

[Graymalkin]

This reply is a bit untimely but you might be better off with a dedicated SAN box rather than a Netra. The dedicated box doesn't need any fancy management and most have pretty decent RAID features if that's what you need. The Netra isn't a bad little server box but you're going to be stuck with a pretty poorly featured machine at $995. A decent SAN will run you the same price and have more storage for you. Then again if you want something that is more versatile check out the Netra. You might also want to check out some Linux OEMs that offer cheapy 1U file servers. The hardware is cheap and they're just using OTS software to do the file sharing.