Setting up the XServe RAID was MUCH easier than i expected.

The fibre channel card and interface seemed largely foolproof, no settings required.

The configuration utility worked very easily - after I set the network settings to use DHCP and disconnected the local DHCP server.

Playback performance was good with standard definition.
Using 2 discs in a RAID 0 configuration, we were able to play 7 layers of dv movies.
So the aggressive caching seems to work.
I didnt expect it to work so well.