Should we get XSan or Drobo

Our company has a small publishing department and they all use Macs. We only have 6 Macs, all desktops or power books, but no Xserves. Right now, we're looking into getting centralized storage just for the Macs. We currently use a shared Windows server drive for our Mac storage, but would like to move away from that for a variety of reasons.
We have two questions:
1) Since we don't have any XServes about how much would it cost us to implement a XSan solution, presuming we have to buy everything? Would you mind listing everything we'd need? It doesn't look like we'd need XServes, for instance, but I want to be sure about that.
2) Maybe we should just go with a low-cost solution. Does anyone have any opinion an the Drobo devices? They look like a cheap way to just get a shared drive with lots of storage for the department. Would a XSan be overkill for such a small department?
Thanks for any help.
Ron

1) I don't think you need Xsan. That's a SAN file system, and if you need SPEED SPEED SPEED then it might be appropriate. For SPEED I mean you're doing high definition video editing, at high definition bit rates (say, > 150 MB/sec). For a small publishing department, this would be unusual.
So I'd say you could get an Xserve plus a Promise RAID. The total for what you'd need with the Xserve, fibre channel card, and RAID would be in the $15K range and you'd get like 8 TB of usable storage, plus or minus. How much storage do you need? If you went with a RAID card and RAID 5 you could get about 2 TB of usable storage with the internal drives, for more like $7K.
2) Drobo isn't what you're looking for. It's a USB drive. You can attach it to a Drobo Share for an extra $100 or $200 and then you have a cheap NAS, that is very slow (max speed maybe 15 MB/sec... TOTAL. So if you have 6 clients you could get an average of 3 MB/sec per client... so we're talking more than 50 TIMES slower than what an Xsan solution would offer).
If $15K is within your budget then the top option would be great and would be very flexible (as you're getting an entire computer and storage system and can do a lot more than just serve files). If that's off by a factor of 4 on cost, then look at something like the Infrant ReadyNAS... 4x1 TB drives in the base unit which costs about $800... so for around $2500 you have 3 TB of usable storage in a NAS box the size of a loaf of bread, which can serve AFP, SMB, NFS, HTTP, etc.

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