Do Not Serve Files From A File Server

I had an email from someone in the IT department at work this morning responding to a request I had to place a largish file on a networked server for others to download.

The killer quote is from the email is...

I think serving the file to large numbers of users from the file server is not a long term solution.

Strange, Answers.com seems to think that the definition of a file server is...

A high-speed computer in a network that stores the programs and data files shared by users. It acts like a remote disk drive. The difference between a file server and an application server is that the file server stores the programs and data, while the application server runs the programs and processes the data.