I've been tasked with researching hardware requirements to host a FM database that will make heavy use of SuperContainer. The plan is to have an xserve hosting SC and an alternate server hosting FM Server. We will have up to 24 users managing about 12 TB (to start, could be up to 20 TB within 12 months) of Audio and Video data using FM and SuperContainer.

Given the plethora of configuration options available with Xserve, I'm looking for a starting point to determine our hardware needs. Will managing this volume of data require a substantial xserve config (max cores and ram)? Will I need to consider a Fibre Channel RAID array to store all of the data? Will SATA or SAS?

A few of many questions...

SuperContainer's requirements and resource usage are very low. You could just install SuperContainer on your FileMaker Server machine, and not use separate hardware. It's not that likely to affect the performance of your FMS deployment.

If you do want to use a separate machine I wouldn't recommend using anything older than OSX 10.4 or Windows 2003/XP. If you've got the hardware to run those OSes then you'll be able to run SuperContainer on it.

Your network speed or internet connection is probably going to be more of a limiting factor than your hard drive speed will be. Faster disk access is always good, but it sounds like you're going to need higher capacity over higher speed drives.