Setting up a two machine edit suite for news editing.

Hi there,

I am a FCP editor and have been asked to give the specs for my dream suite for a possible job coming up. They say they will create this suite from scratch... I am thinking two machines, networked, editing in ProRes HQ so it's HD all the way. It is for news editing and as such there will be a huge amount of footage coming in. Also, later on we will be working on features with this too.

The following kit has been mentioned to me as reliable and top end:

2 x New Mac Pro:

Two 2.93GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon “Westmere” (12 cores)

64GB of DDR3 ECC SDRAM memory

Mac Pro RAID Card and multiple SATA hard drives: 4 x 2TB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s hard drive

PCI Express graphics cards: ATI Radeon HD 5870 1GB

RME Fireface 800

Apple Fibre Channel card

2 x Apple Xserve 7 TB RAID

1 x Blackmagic Design Multibridge Extreme I/O

2 x Wacom intuos 4 tablet (medium)

4 x 27" Apple Cinema monitors

Apple Xsan v2.2 - 1 Node STORAGE OR Final cut server???

I'm just wondering if this is overkill and if I am including stuff here which is overlapping with another piece of kit that's doing the same thing.

Any help to demystify this would be very much appreciated.

Cheers,

Charlie