Since most have mentioned open-source such as GRASS, I'll assume you have a few thousand for annual licenses within your department.  Excelis ENVI+IDL, ERDAS Imagine, and possibly ArcGis Desktop (ArcInfo 10.1).  Envi, Imagine, and ArcGis Desktop are all major, international providers of GIS software.  Imagine is said to be the rosetta stone of GIS as it interfaces with just about every GIS format imaginable.  I'm most familiar with ENVI+IDL myself and have had a good experience with it.  There are also several, smaller utilities available that are free and useful.  HDFView, Freelook (which is a free version of envi that's hard to find nowadays), Corpscon, 6S, etc.  You'll have to prioritize and look at pricing as well as features &amp; functionalities of each option.  Good luck!

GIS Software Choice for a small university research centre
I have been using a raspberry PI since more than one year, with two USB 500GB IDE hard drives as a NAS/torrent box. Yesterday, one of the two hard drives started a repetitive rattling noise, and I could not read data from it through sftp. 

I assumed it was broken, so I opened the box the raspberry and the hard drives were in, connected the first HD to my laptop using the IDE to USB adapter I had. Windows wasn't able to mount it. I really cannot remember which FS this HD is using, so I tried to mount it on a Debian Virtual Machine. The image below shows the error I get. I have no idea what it means, what I understand is that Debian does not recognize which FS the hard disk is using.



This is the result of fdisk -l (only the part regarding the mentioned HDD):

Disk /dev/sdb: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
81 heads, 63 sectors/track, 191411 cylinders, total 976773168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x17e817e7

  Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1            2048   976773167   488385560   83  Linux

