As I just started as well, I am about midgame right now, just set up an AE system, but when I started I immeaditly set up a SAG mill and Alloy smelter on either side of a Stirling Generator. All of these are easy to make and now you have a easy ore doubling method that just takes coal to power. As soon as I had the resources I made a Magmatic Dynamo hooked up to a drum filled with lava. I used Ender IO pressurized fluid conduits but you could probably use Buildcraft pipes or another type of piping. I also made a leadstone energy cell to store the excess energy. Pretty much a infinite power source.
For storage I would use barrels for your heavy hitters such as cobble, dirt, and wood, and then iron chests or even more upgraded chests for storage.
I don't know about you but for early game resources I used a mining turtle. As soon as you have three diamonds you can make it, and it never will break or anything. Check out this video
for instructions. Don't worry, you don't need to worry about setting up a GPS yet as long as you don't exit the server while it's going. Just download the program, put in the name of the program, i used OreQuarry, and then do it like this: OreQuarry 10 x (then stand next to it at the same level and check the Y pos on your minimap and then put that down, here I used x as an example) then just hit enter and there you go, plenty of resources. I would set up a chunkloader for it as soon as you get 2 more diamonds so if you go out of the chunk it doesn't lose its code and just stop because that is a pain in the butt.