You mention you have a lab - any reason you wouldn't consider just hanging a nice fat chunk of local storage off one of the Mac's? You could software RAID1 a pair of external enclosures using Disk Util. It's a fairly robust solution in my testing.
Otherwise I don't have any advice - I went higher end and got a Drobo. Despite not being a fan of proprietary storage solutions, it's definitely a nice solution that works as advertised. It's pricy though.
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-Scott
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