We committed to SQL Server a long time ago. It's served us very well and it will take a lot of effort to replace it. To keep up with increasing workloads we've

We committed to SQL Server a long time ago. It's served us very well and it will take a lot of effort to replace it. To keep up with increasing workloads we've had to purchase reasonably expensive hardware - I think the last server cost us almost $100k. The #1 bottleneck has always been disk IO. To compensate for slow disks you need to increase RAM and make big RAID arrays, both fairly expensive options compared to the Intel SSDs available now. Upgrading our current hardware with only $10k worth of SSDs will add at least a year or two to the life of our SQL Servers.