If you are going to be the one in charge of the XSAN you should have your company send you to one of the XSAN classes. The ones I know about right now are the V.2 consulting classes. There are probably others, so you should look around. There is too much information to post here on how to maintain an XSAN, the classes will really help you get an "overall" picture.
http://www.vdot2.com/ (solid training classes here)
The basics of XSAN is that the volume sits on your desktop as if you have a firewire drive mounted (but much faster). If it is configured correctly the drive will auto mount every time you start up, there is no need to "connect to server." again, if it is setup correctly, it should be a very simple system that requires little maintenance, just an eye to watch capacity, but that goes for any RAID based system.
-Jordan
