Avid Media Composer and sharing media on a SAN

Can someone help me out here: I am coming from Final Cut Pro, and I don't really understand how Avid MC deals with media files. In researching a SAN solution I see references to things like "Virtualization for Avid” (metaSAN) and "Project sharing" (EditShare). I had been tending towards a metaSAN solution, but they only support the "Virtualization for Avid” on windows, and I would like to leave open the option to stay on Macs.

So I am picking up that Avid won't just link directly to the media on a volume, they require the media to be moved into a project file? And of course multiple stations can't share the project file directly, so these solutions above are a hacky translation layer that fakes out MC to thinking they are the only one touching the project?

I don't need full "project sharing", but I do need multiple edit stations linking to the same media, to avoid duplicating the media for each edit station (the whole point of a SAN vs. DAS yes?).