At my current job, we had a major application (our police department) running on the same DB2 i series box for 18 years. The box never went down for maintenance and never failed during that time. That would be a noteworthy feat for a mainframe, of which I have 25 years experience. But the i series would correspond more as a mid-level server when it was installed. But alas, our application got upgraded and the platform of choice was Windows/SQL Server. It is running pretty well ***now***, but we have had our problems.

Please don't take this as bad mouthing SQL Server. Today SS2012 is a very robust product. How it works out for you depends greatly on your technical architecture. If the architect cut corners, yep, you as the DBA (and ultimately the business) will find out the hard way.

With your post and this reply, I am hoping for others to see a perspective -- both from a company perspective as well as a platform perspective.

Regards, JMD