Hi thanks for the response

The design of the hardware is for future customers of ours so I am looking into how to mitigate performance risks. We use VMWare and have 2 hosts plus a SAN but we only host our software on it and only 10 - 15 VM's run on this kit. We already over spec the hardware to take into account 5 years of growth and unknown factors.

The software we make and sell is very customisable and each customers performance profiles will be different so as before I want to make get the best bang performance within our budget for new hardware.

I am worried about the single point of failure of the card but we can get around this with either 15 minute log backups or SQL Server 2012 Always on or DB Mirroring.

Basically I want to spec the best hardware for around £35k.