Hardware for serving lots of rasters

[Matthew Haines]

If you're just serving precached tiles, I recommend buying the cheapest 
hardware you can lay your hands on and having two or three complete 
sets.  Our web site (propertyshark.com) serves about 5,000 to 10,000 
users per day.  We use celeron servers with non-raid IDE drives.  The 
servers cost something like $345 in rackmount cases with no rails, no 
drives, and no RAM.  We pop in IDE drives and 1 stick of RAM, and off we 
go.  We have mirrored machines and using another machine to load balance 
between them.  The load balancing is just for fault tolerance -- one 
machine could easily handle the entire load.

Matthew