High performance shared storage for Mac based studio

Hi Guys, just joined the forum; I'm very excited about learning and sharing knowledge with the community.

I'm looking for some advice in high performance shared storage.

I just joined a new studio that is a Mac only house and all my previous experience was in Windows or Linux based studios. We are looking to buy a new Storage server, maybe a software defined storage solution.

Since AFP is pretty much dead now, and the SMB stack is far from ideal in OSX; I'm wondering what people are using out there.

What about filesystems, any advice on good ZFS or GPFS implementations? Any advice is welcome.

Cheers