Were trying to centralize and consilidate our small network at the office. Were a small creative firm and computing thus far has been disorganized and dangerous (no adequate backup scheme). Doing the work that we do poses some questions about performance in a networked storage environment. NAmeley speed… if everything is stored in one location and we are always working off a network drive are we going to see issues when were applying that "lens flare" effect to a 125mb photoshop file? Whats it gonna be like with 2 people doing this at one time? Add on the administrative birds working in MS Office apps at the same time…. IVe done stuff like this before… i mean worked in situation like that with NO problem, but im also not sure that what we have a budget for in terms of equipment and what not is going to be able to produce something like that.

In addition to that, if it is possible what products would you reccommend? Ideally id like somehting that supported NFS, AFP, and SMB. I dont want to have to use any kind of crazy client software on the machines…

Alternatively, and really like to go this way if its feasible, the cheaper route would be to jsut get external firewire RAID arrays, or even single drives, we probably wouldnt need anymore than 200GB available active at any time. However, wed want something that was fairly expandable just in case… At some point we may start doing some video so we might need to up active size considerabley – not that the device(s) would have to be able to run as a renderwall or anything but more in terms of just storage. This also raises another question in gegards to performance. If we went this route the server would have to be responsible for mounting and sharing the drives. This isnt going to be the most beastly machine in the world – it will be a:

1.6GHZ G4 iMac (Domed)
80GB HD
1GB RAM
OS X Server 10.4

But in this scenario not only would we have all SMB/AFP/NFS action going on but it would be running multiple other services, Open Directory, FTP, HTTP, MySQL, ColdFusion, Tomcat, Apache, PHP4, PHP5, Ruby, etc..

I also thought about getting a cheap pc, stuffing full of RAM and HD Space, and throwing Debian or the like on it. But then i realized except for the stuff i know from Darwin and working on webservers, i know nothing about Linux, so there would be a substantial learning curve there for admin/tech that i dont know i have the time for…