Get a used dual proc mirror-door G4 and the Kona LS and you have a injest station for your downconverted SD materials from the Kona LHe. Definitely cheaper than a DigiBeta if recording is your main purpose.
In the AJA control panel, set the format to the input signal and in FCP, choose your SD capture preset and you’re all set. You may also want to check the downconvert setting in the AJA control panel if you are using an SD video monitor.
We’ve got a SANmp setup with an XServe RAID and it has an Avid on OSX, Nuendo on OSX and a Cinewave connected. So far it’s been running fine. The original plan was to have an Avid on OS9 on the SAN as well but we ran into some issues with SANmp Admin so decided in the end to confine that system to local drives.