Also you can avoid a SPOF in NFS with Isilon's commercial offering (which worked great in my experience, at least back when they were using an implementation based on FreeBSD's kernel NFS server), or potential Red Hat's HA setup.

Also, CephFS is an option too and avoids a SPOF by design. I've only run Ceph block storage but it's absolutely a real distributed system and works well.

r.e. old: nfsv4 is a different beast than nfs3;

r.e. secure: these things don't hold true with krb5 auth.

One of the first things that come to my mind when I hear "networked filesystem" is the typical setup at most companies I worked at in the past (those with more than a dozen or so people; plus of course schools and university I attended), where you have log on authentication via LDAP/AD/... and the system would mount network shares with your user files, files from the teams/projects you were on, etc.

I would have a desktop PC in the office, but could also just walk over to the lab, login with the same credentials at a PC there and have all my files. Meeting rooms would also have permanently installed PCs and you wouldn't have to fidget with the projector connections/settings, you just log on and are good to go.

On top of that, none of those systems would be my personal property and I wouldn't take them home with me, or bother installing/updating software. Other people would be paid full time to make sure everything works and I have access to all the files and software I need (and only those I need). Sounds crazy, right?

I'm eager to hear your recommended redesign.