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Kinda sounds like you are looking for a couple pieces of hardware. For a minimal server Mac mini will be fine, as far as lifespan mine has been running as a media server nonstop since November 2011. No issues. As far as the video work Mac Pro is pretty much the final word. I left apple just as the "trash can" pros came out, but they are beasts.
young_gun
CYOA
Servers...
Our office has three MBPs and I'm about to pick up a 5k iMac. Until now we've been using Google Apps for email, sharing and hosting files etc but, apart from email which we'd like to keep with GApps, it's a bit clunky. I'm thinking of setting up some kind of dedicated server. There's not a massive budget so OS X server sounds promising at £14.99.
We'd primarily want to share documents between existing users and occasionally between freelancers who come in albeit with different permissions.
I'm also interested to see if we can sort some kind of file hosting function rather than using WeTransfer all the time. On that note there are plans to have some kind of client portal on our website - would that be linked to a local server or more to do with our web hosting provider?
We'd need to access the files 24hrs a day, not just when someone is in the office.
We'd need to access locally via Wifi/Ethernet and remotely from home/the field.
Lastly and a bit left field - is there a way to utilise processing power of all computers by somehow daisy chaining them and if so can this be done through the server or would they need to be physically wired together? We're a fast growing video company and often have tons of encoding/exports to do (we use Premiere if that makes a difference) so any extra juice we can find would be more than handy.
At the top end of the scale presumably we'd need a machine running server software that would need to be plugged in at all times. We were thinking of a Mac Mini but what's the lifespan of these things. Can they take the heat? Obviously I don't want to leave the 5k iMac running all the time and the laptops all go out on shoots regularly so we'd need something dedicated.
At the very lower /temporary end of the scale (and shoot me down if this is stupid) but would an AirPort Time Capsule work? Surely we could share files hosted on that to multiple users? Though presumably we couldn't do the more advanced things like access remotely and daisy chain processors for exports?