Re: Advice

Final Cut Server is definitely a potential solution for your client. You can coordinate productions with different or overlapping assets, assign them to users, and users can copy the proxy files or the raw data locally for editing. They can check in or check out assets and upload the results back into the system for approval (all with email notifications). If your client and his subs are using Final Cut Pro there are a few extra features that make it a bit easier to work with, and I imagine this will keep being extended with future releases.

(XSan isn't in the cards here. That is intra-facility -- if you want to extend it to other users, well... You have to REALLY want to.)

Final Cut Server isn't a bad solution once you figure out how to get it in front of the firewall, or allow users to tunnel in via VPN. You kind of want it in a commercial data center with a big pipe so that it doesn't saturate your client's facility's upstream bandwidth.

An XServe box running Leopard Server (or Leopard, really) would be a fine piece of hardware to colocate at a data center, as it will run both Final Cut Server and Compressor (which Final Cut Server uses for transcoding).

Final Cut Server isn't too fussy about storage devices, so if you want an alternative to XServe RAID, go for it. Since no one will be editing in place (Editing directly off the server) performance isn't the big issue -- it's reliability. That said, XServe RAID is trivial to integrate, easy to administer and very well-designed. For someone who wants good performance and high availability without having to learn to be a sysadmin nerd, XServe and XServe RAID is a damn fine combo.

Final Cut Server also has excellent archiving support, so plan on adding an archive/backup device of some sort at the co-lo, even if it's just a giant slow cheap disk array.

Unfortunately FCServer doesn't seem to have a way to plug in high-speed file transfer services like Aspera or File Catalyst, though I could be wrong.

If you want to roll your own I believe the open-source Alfresco project has much of the same functionality. But it would require extensive customization. That's kind of along the lines of your initial thinking -- host the media on the Web and Alfresco would manage the traffic and workflow. What doesn't change is the fact that you want it all colocated in a data center.

You might also look at what the high-speed file transport services recommend.