Help on Setting up Xserve Raid

Question

In our department we have three MacPro's, and one G5 Quad. We want to add an Xserve Raid to store and serve hi-res image files to each workstation. There is a company wide network (intranet) to which we have aready added the workstations, along with printers, however our IT people do not support the Mac platform and we are on our own as far as getting the Xserve Raid in the mix.
I am looking for advice as to how best to set it up and what sort of addition hardware or software we might need.
MacPro   Mac OS X (10.4.8)   4gig ram
MacBook Pro   Mac OS X (10.4.7)  

Answer 1

I'd concur that it's generally a bad idea to use a production machine as a file server. OS X is fairly stable though. Worst case will likely be you'd loose the file server if an errant application hung up the finder. I can't remember the last time I've had an OS X box lock up solid.. though they do occassionally become unusable from the console.
If you're really budget constrained, put it on the tower. Just be careful about the Fibre controller. Apple has made PCI-X and PCI-E versions over the years.
As far as whos controller to buy, Apple's isn't just competative, it's a steal. It's a 2Gb/channel controller and it runs over Copper (not real fiber optic). You can find cheaper FC cards but they are 1Gb per channel. There are also 4Gb per channel cards.. these will generally fall back to 2 or 1 Gb per channel but they are VERY expensive. FC has come down a lot but it's not unusual to find cards with the same specs as Apple's for twice the price. At least one of our sys admins puts Apple's cards in his x86 Linux servers because they are the cheapest cards he can get. (they also work in Windows 2003 machines since they are just rebranded cards from another vendor.. we're running one in a Dell next door.. as a test for the XSan we're building).