Hardware for serving lot's of Raster

[Shoaib Burq]

Just to put things into perspective. The data will cover 40,000
hectare or 400 sq-km covering 11 discrete regions, spread along a
coastal length of about 600 km's.

To start with there will be 2 layers (bathymetry & sonar backscatter).
I expect to pyramid and tile the contiguous regions to an optimal
tile-size (in memory) for map-server to chew-up. I am still unsure how
to determine this "optimal" tile size. Any suggestions? We'll probably
be on a 64 bit platform, perhaps using SUSE. The max resolution will
be 2m pixel size.

Later (maybe) we will add about 5 more layers of derived classified layers.

We are unsure of the expected users, but I suspect if we advertise it
heavily it may be up to 50 visitors a day during the early mad rush
when it first comes online, trickling down to nothing :) In addition
to standard mapserver web-client (like ka-map) connections, we want to
run a WMS and WCS.

Thanks for all the input so far.