In all truth and fairness, if you find a good system that you like to administrate, whether it is Mac, Windows, or even Linux for some applications, you're going to be set in this day and age. For my purposes, I went with Windows Server 2000 & 2003. For the most part this decision was based on familiarity, reliability, and cost effectiveness. Many people are already swearing by the Mac OS X Server platform, but as I've stated earlier, in testing it out, I just haven't found it to be quite "there" yet. We had already invested in a many thousand dollar file/backup server previous to the upgrade which ran Windows 2000, so there was no way to simply toss that out.
We upgraded our file server to Windows 2003 just for the sake of homogeneity and also because 2003 is not all that different from 2000. It's so much similar that it seems most Windows 2000 applications will run fine on 2003. Such was the case for the Font Reserve Server system. While it wasn't rated to run on Windows 2003 when we installed it, it ran just fine. The software is pretty easy to install, but the version we initially installed was 1.7 and the problems we had with it were inherent to that release, such as a memory leak that required the service to be restarted every day--not fun. There were also problems with the client for Font Reserve Server 1.7 in how it interacted with InDesign and other programs. For all practical purposes, install version 1.7.2 or greater. After installing that, a large degree of our problems disappeared and made our lives a lot better. Version 1.7.2 isn't the end-all be-all for the software though and new releases should be installed as soon as they can.
One important bit to note is that there is a lot of information about how to set up fonts on an OS X machine so that you won't run in to any problems when you go to press. Essentially, Apple decided to created these damned things called dfonts. They're fine just for working on the machine normally, but when it comes to press work, they're trash. When you set up Font Reserve you essentially need to let it overtake the systems where the client is running on. To do this, you need a User System Fonts folder in the Administration Workgroup. This is not adequately covered in the instructions very well, but make sure to do this if you want to make sure that dfonts don't find their way into your finished documents. When you start up a system that is running the Font Reserve Server client, it will come up with a message asking if you want to move the fonts. This requires Administrator rights on your system and it also requires that you let it happen. Once it moves all the fonts, the system will then be extremely reliant on your Font Reserve Server system, so if you want to do this to a laptop, you probably want to think twice. If a machine is not able to contact the Font Reserve Server, it will have a lot of font problems when viewing documents, surfing the internet, getting email, and just about any other basic function. The machine won't crash, but it also won't be very usable.
It may actually be easier to skip the entire User System Fonts process if you find that from the above information, you will net more pain than you gain. Just think about which course of action you want to take before you do it, since changing gears mid-production cycle is not going to make you a popular individual.
Oh yes, even though you can do it, don't even think about having people at another office location, tethered to yours via a T1 or what you try to access the Font Reserve Server for regular operation. It's maddening to say the least and it will slow them down greatly. Font Reserve Server is a very crucial part to a system once it's set up and any small blip in your network or Point-to-Point connection and you're going to have a very unhappy employee after what it does to their system.
For storage, we used our large, terabyte of storage server to act as our file server. OS X and Windows 2003 actually play quite nice with one another for file serving concerns. We have however run into a couple big problems. The first one was that even though we have gigabit Ethernet ports on all the workstations, servers, and switches in the office, we were running all the data for the file server through a single Ethernet port. We're not exactly sure how it started, but these huge slowdowns in data transmission started occurring for both OS X and older OS 9 machines. It may have been the port was failing or it may have been due to a problem with AppleTalk. We weren't sure which one was the cause for sure, but we had to fix it, since it would take about five minutes to transfer a megabyte of information.
Our solution consisted of installing more ports on the server. We now have four and they're all gigabit. That is the solution I'd recommend for most people out there trying to solve the problem in a hurry. The other option is to install a hotfix from Microsoft that directly deals with this issue. We never installed this hotfix since our multi-port solution has worked out fine, although there have been some occasions where it seems things are slowing down again and the hotfix may need to be installed, although I'm hoping it's a fix in Windows 2003 SP1. AppleTalk also causes some other problems with InDesign & InCopy, but I'll get in to those when discussing workstation setup.
Beyond the items I've listed to this point and things such as a Domain Controller, DHCP server, DNS server, the only other thing that has to be installed on a server if you need it is the Quark License Administrator. If for some reason, you need to run multiple copies of Quark 6.5 (the latest version as of this writing) then you'll want the QLA. We have a group that processes ads and a lot of them come in from people using Quark, so they need these files. No, the InDesign Quark 4.11 import function won't always work and people are using Quark 5, 6, and even 6.5 out there, so you may very well need this set up. The initial setup is decently easy, but there are a lot of steps and it gets redundant to do all of this. Luckily, once it is set up you don't need to mess with it again. So, if you need to set up QLA, just think of it as a reminder as to why you're switching over to InDesign. I just hope that Quark will send you the correct serial number.