Building a Mini Render Farm

Yes but the need for a separate render only storage with constantly updated duplicates of all your assets and projects may not be so trivial in cost or complexity. And upgrading the current storage server's throughput and i/o performance may not be cheap either. Of course this depends a bit on the existing storage system.
 
Long time Mac user here, recently added a 36-core Windoze machine loaded to the hilt with memory and GPU (Tesla's) and the thing makes my maxed-out 10-core nMP look lame. (yes, 10 core...custom installed CPU...3.0 GHz) I still like OS X interface and operability better, but in rendering and editing situations the Windows machine just kills the Mac! I use it for DaVinci Resolve mostly, but when I have a big render, just punt it to that box from the Mac and watch it eat bytes like a Japanese movie monster.

As another user mentioned, speed between machines (networking) is a big consideration. We have a very efficient 10G network, but Infiniband 40G is on the upgrade list since we're currently working with Red 6K material and 8K coming soon.

Be prepared for some pain going from mac to Windows, but the speed is a big factor on intensive renders.
 
You can go to 40gb ethernet, the hardware is out there now just that Infiniband is more widely known right now.

If you have good hardware you should also be able to aggregate a bunch of 10gb connections into much faster. But disk speed comes into play somewhere in there too, a simple 4 disk NAS or SAN just wont keep up with those speeds.
 
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