SQL HW to performance ration

I am seeking a way to find bottlenecks in SQL server and it seems that more than 32GB ram and more than 32 spindels on 8 cores are not enough. Are there any metrics, best practices or HW comparations (i.e. transactions per sec)? Our daily closure takes hours and I want it in minutes or realtime if possible. I was not able to merge more than 12k rows/sec. For now, I had to split the traffic to more than one server, but is it a proper solution for ~50GB database? Merge is enclosed in SP and keeped as simple as it can be - deduplicate input, inser开发者_运维问答t new rows, update existing rows. I found that the more rows we put into single merge the more rows per sec we get. Application server runs in more threads, and uses all the memory and processor on its dedicated server.

Follow a methodology like Waits and Queues to identify the bottlenecks. That's exactly what is designed for. Once you identified the bottleneck, you can also judge whether is a hardware provisioning and calibration issue (and if so, which hardware is the bottleneck), or if is something else.

The basic idea is to avoid having to do random access to a disk, both reading and writing. Without doing any analysis, a 50 GB database needs at least 50GB of ram. Then you have to make sure indexes are on a separate spindle from the data and the transaction logs, you write as late as possible, and critical tables are split over multiple spindles. Are you doing all that?