Hello,
    I wanted to pick your brains and get some ideas on building a system. If you had a $5,000 budget and needed to build a system for a small architecture firm, what hardware, software, OS and storage would you recommend? Thanks

First,, your budget is not big enough. I am guessing you want a "bunch" of storage for the drawings and plans. Price an EMC storage system and look at the cost. While the "server" itself, does not have to be that robust, you have to have the potential to upgrade the hardware as the firm grows. Then you have the operating system to add on top of the hardware. How much is a 10 user license for Windows server 2008? And the list just grows, from there.. If the firm cannot afford the type of expense you are looking at, mayb you can find someone to host the solution. But then you have to look at the cost of the iternet lines,, and they need to be "large", enough, to handle all that data moving back and forth.