Network Home Directories on RAID

We are setting up a x-serve RAID to host home directories. It's been fairly easy to do. I've created a share-point and automounted it and have some users home-folders in it and they are able to login and get their home directories. My only concern is that by setting up the share through WGM, the folder is shared over AFP and SMB and I'm worried about the load that will place on a single server through the fibre-channel connection. We are a school with around 3000 users. Is there a better way to do this? I don't think we can afford to set up a SAN right now, should we not try to cluster the home folders until we can afford a SAN?