Professionals in various fields such as medical imaging, biology and civil engineering require rapid access to huge amounts of pixmap image data. This paper fulfils these requirements by conceiving and developing an architecture integrating processing and disk arrays. It presents the concept of stripping images onto multiple disk nodes. It shows how images can be adequately partitioned into rectangular extents. It presents image access speed improvements obtained by extracting relevant image parts at the disk node level and by accessing image information located in disk node caches. With current T800 transputer-based technology, a system composed of eight disk nodes offers access to three full colour 512×512 pixmap image parts per second