Yeah I totally agree. the staging server could be very minimal as long as the data itself was on the SAN.

Ideally, I'd like the two reporting DBs to be on their own box as well.

but not in the cards until we can prove the business case.

currently this is holding it's own with the current hardware configuration (actually doing quite well).

To be honest, we didnt even have the reporting server in the budget.

we had to beg borrow and steal to get it.

since reports were timing out in prod, we had a captive audience....

you know how it goes. We probably wont get another machine or two until someone is bleeding again.