For our design, we ended up with:

•Dell PowerEdge R720 with 2 quad-core CPUs, 384GB memory – $10k

•16 Samsung 840 Pro 512GB SSDs – $8k

•Hardware total: under $20k

•SQL Server Enterprise Edition licensing for 8 cores – $56k

Kinda keeps things in perspective, doesn’t it? The hardware seems insanely overpowered until you look at how much licensing costs. At that point, why wouldn’t you buy this kind of hardware?