we use HP hardware where i work

Proliant DL 380's are quad core and go to 32GB of RAM. they just release a DL 580 that will take up to 256GB of RAM.

for storage HP has the MSA 70 that takes the 146GB SAS drives and the MSA 60 that will take SATA 750GB and SAS 300GB hard drives with up to 12 drives per enclosure

last year i set up a server with RAID 0 + 1 and it was pretty quick. but people complained about the cost. now we are just staying with RAID 5 and haven't really noticed any performance difference. the new hard drives are very fast and we have so much that the sheer number of spindles is probably making up for any degradation from writing the parity bit

and unless you absolutely have to install 32 bit, i would install the 64 bit versions of windows and SQL over 32 bit. with 64 bit you can migrate your licenses to faster hardware as long as there is driver support. with 32 bit you are really limiting yourself

i would ask for the following

DL 580 with 32GB of RAM (make sure you get the most densest RAM chips available so you won't have to junk them later when you upgrade)

2 quad core CPU's

P400 RAID controller will be included

get the backplane so it can have all 16 internal hard drives

DVD-RW

P800 RAID controller

MSA60

12 300GB SAS hard drives

16 146GB SAS hard drives

use the internal hard drives for OS, paging file, tempdb and logs

use the external drives for the database and index storage

the new SAS storage you can piggyback something like 8 MSA's to each other per RAID controller. i think it comes out to around 100TB of storage max

it takes up to 4 quad core CPU's but i'm not sure if windows 2003 enterprise will let you use all of them