🚀 go-pugleaf

I am trying to help a university in Brazil that has just come on line
on the Internet. 

Say, they had a user base of 2000 users of which no more than  100-150
were active at any given time.

And users did mostly intercative work, News and mail and occasional
file transfers using ftp etc .

No graphics or software development or other CPU intensive 
work on the machine.

I understand that this is a very vague question, but what is the
minimal unix machine they should be looking to buy with "reasonable"
response?

If they were stuck on Sun Microsystems, what model should they be
looking at ?

Would they be better of in investing in many smaller machines rather
than a large one ? I suspect the answer is yes, but mainframe 
technology is still too ingrained there ..

They currently have a Sparc II.  What changes can they make to their
Sparc II kernel to performance tune it for this kind of use for about 50
simultaneous users ?

Email replies will be appreciated.