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Its key weakness is its inability to change RAID sets easily. Falcon Systems sends the system already assembled for you, expecting that you won't be changing the RAID sets. When we attempted to change them without guidance from Falcon Systems, we confused the system. The rebuilding stage required several phone calls and 20 hours to format the RAID devices. Thankfully, under normal operation, RAID sets are rarely changed.

The administration for FastfilePro is performed via a simple text interface. Although not as flashy as a GUI, the text-based system is clear-cut and easy to use. It offers all the features necessary to run the system directly from the main menu. Although it has quite a different feel than a Unix-based system, the menuing system is powerful and a big plus for the FastfilePro.

A text-based interface lets the FastfilePro offer remote administration that looks exactly like the local administration. The FastfilePro can be administered remotely via telnet, and the only noticeable difference is the lack of color.

FilefastPro is the only server we tested with locking drive bays, which prevent the accidental dislodging of drives; for a drive to be removed from the SCSI bus, it must be unlocked. We found this feature to be useful.

To offer better performance, FastfilePro uses a solid-state RAM device: a battery-backed cache. This cache lets the FastfilePro safely return from an NFS write operation while the information is still in RAM. We were impressed with FastfilePro's ability to perform most of th e Unix-style networking abilities, including backing up using tar, IP forwarding between network interfaces and N etwork Information Services (NIS).

Sun Microsystems Computer Netra NFS 150
Sun Microsystems has been a leader in the NFS server race for some time, and its latest product, Netra NFS 150, is another strong competitor--especially in terms of price. In price/performance, Netra NFS tops the chart. Costing about one-third of the other products we tested, Netra NFS offers a lot of bang for your buck. But all is not roses; we found its administration and disk configuration tools to be lacking.

Netra NFS offers hot-swappable drives, standby drives, a larger capacity than earlier versions and an integrated uninterruptible power supply (UPS). It also includes support for other network protocols, including LAN Manager, AppleShare and IPX, letting most computers systems access Netra NFS' services without a special daemon running.

Its Web browser-based GUI is cumbersome to use. Tasks, such as adding users and controlling how file systems are exported, seemed divorced from the system. There were times when we weren't quite sure what the system was doing or if it was responding to our commands. Along with this disconnected feeling, Netra NFS does a poor job of controlling its drive arrays--at times it seemed to spin its drives for no apparent reason. We were surprised to find that Netra NFS will let you use only a few drives in your RAID set, leaving some unconfigured devices. However, if configured this way, it won't let you use the other drives for anything productive. We hope the next release of its server software clears up these issues.

We also found that our experience with Solaris hurt us more than it helped. The Netra NFS series of servers overwrites much of the Solaris system files without prompting. A number of times we tried to take shortcuts, such as editing /etc files manually, rather than using the GUI tool. However, after a reboot, all of our chang es were destroyed. Additionally, if you enter incorrect data into Netra NFS--a wrong IP address for instance--it becomes im possible to administer the server from the Web browser. Because it does not offer a display adapter, you must configure the machine from an ASCII terminal.