Hello Colin,

We purchased a Dell PowerVault 725N NAS server about a year ago, it had better test results than the others in the same category at the time. It runs a full version of Win2000 Server that has been tweaked so it does not require a keyboard/Mouse/Monitor and can be managed via web browser. It can still run any Win2000 stuff, but I currently just use it for storage. There is a unlimited user license that comes with it, so the hardware/software preconfigured was less than just the costs of the licensing of 2000! It was up and running in about 30 Min and supports/integrates with Unix/Linux/Windows/Novell. My NAS came with 512M Ram 420Gig IDE hot swap raid. If you need more performance I would reccomend more memory, possibly SCSI, but that will raise the cost. Very easy to manage and trouble free.

Hope that helps

Bob

>Hi
>
>I am examining NAS as an alternative to Windows 2000 Server mainly because of licence restrictions on Windows 2000 Server. I currently have licences for 15 users but have up to 25 potential users of the database applications I have developed. By way of background the existing server traffic is fairly light with the exception of the VFP6 database applications which I intend to move to NAS. Existing servier drives are SCSI.
>
>All the workstations access local exe's with local tmp files. Should I expect to find NAS (with presumably IDE drives) slower or faster than using the existing aerver?
>
>Does anyone have any experience out there?
>
>Thanks
>
>Colin Northway