Speaking strictly about FCP, and from my observations and experiences, I'd say centralized storage is used by a minority of FCP's 1.5 million registered users (I think FCP is up to 1.5 million now). FCP is most popular with the low end and middle segments of the industry and enterprise level solutions are beyond the scope and cost of most of these users. For most just buying more local storage (internal or external) and 'sneaker netting' footage if multi-editor collaboration is required is a more simple and less expensive option. For those that do need to venture into this realm though there are turnkey solutions such as
EditShare that are probably more popular than Apple's offerings (again due to price and easy of use). Of course once you get into higher end companies that have invested in FCP (such as CNN, 21st Century FOX, Bunim/Murray Productions, etc.,.) they will have more of the resources and infrastructure to go more 'all out' when it comes to shared storage. Even going all out doesn't mean needing hundreds of seats. 20 or 30 edit bays running full time is a pretty big, pretty busy facility. There are bigger ones out there but they aren't very common at all if you are looking at the world of post production as a whole.
Not to state the obviously but the loss of Xserves could a big deal to companies that have built their shared storage around Apple's xSan and/or spent the time and money it takes to hand code Final Cut Server into something useful. Those are still just the minority of the user base though. Where I'm at we very Mac centric so our production technology guys are a little word about the upgrade path for our three xSans (around 140TB of combined storage). Hopefully Apple will reveal alternatives in the future so that companies that have invested hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars, won't be up a creek but who knows. Apple doesn't release roadmaps and relatively soon people will maintaining these systems will have to decide what their alternatives are.
For Avid users I've found that centralized storage is more often utilized and I think it's that way for a few reasons. Avid is still dominant with the higher-end (bigger budget) productions, Avid software is better designed for multi-user environments (FCP is basically a single-user product that can be shoehorned into multi-user situations), and Avid makes first party, shared storage systems (Unity and ISIS) that are purpose built for post production. Avid has even qualified FCP for use on it's Unity and ISIS systems.
Lethal
