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Here is a nice tutorial on how set up a server to render tiles with Mapnik:

If you want to serve tiles you would then have to take a look at mod_tile: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Mod_tile

Great. Thank you for the pointers.

http://simplegeo.com/ is trying to fill this niche. They provide a simple API for storing and querying geospatial data.

GeoServer + PostGIS is the typical setup, in my experience it's "light" enough.