Ram on Rails React Native's questions

We are a rapidly growing startup in our 3rd financial year. As we are expanding our resources (read team members) we feel the need to decide what is best

We are about 5-6 people expanding to 10-15 What is suggested?

• Individual laptops to everyone on network (quite a regular solution)
• Central server with login for each team member (keyboard + mouse + display)
• Other?

Our requirement

• We use MacOSX + Windows + Linux at different machines/projects for our products and services
• All MacOSX machines so far are pro laptops. They need to seamlessly connect
• All desktops (so far) are MS-windows + Linux dual-boot
• We need a stable backup management (currently using physically attached disk with each computer)
• We need security and safety of data (client + ours)

What are the most significant factors to consider?

• safety & security?
• versatility?
• simplicity?
• cost?
• other?

Any help here would be appreciated.

Update (22-Sep-2011): Thanks to everyone for their valuable suggestions. We decided to just add a few more desktops in the existing network and keep using the google, skype, other collaboration techniques we have been using.

Which database to decide upon? Any comparisions?

• Existing: postgresql
• Issues
  • Not easily scalable horizontal. Needs sharding etc
  • Clustering does not solve the data growth problem
• Looking for: Any database that is easily horizontally scalable
  • Cassandra (Twitter uses that?)
  • MongoDB (rapidly gaining popularity)
  • Voldemort
  • Other?
• Why?
  • Data growing with snowball effect
  • existing postgresql locks table etc for vaccuum tasks periodically
  • Archiving data is tideous currently
  • Human interaction involved in existing archive, vaccuum, ... process periodically
  • Need a 'set it. forget it. just add another server when data grows more.' type of solution