When designing VLDBs for large transactional volume, I keep these design techniques for better scalability and performance. Details on each of these points will come in future.

• Processor related:

1. MAX DEGREE OF PARALLELISM  and MAXDOP
2. COST THRESHOLD FOR PARALLELISM
3. Soft-NUMA

• Memory
  1. /PAE, /AWE, /3GB (not needed for 32 bit machines)
  2. Lock Pages in Memory
  3. MAX/MIN SERVER MEMORY

• FileGroups and Partitioning:

1. Multiple FG & Files
2. No data in Primary FG (for online restore)
3. Use Table Partitions
4. Allocate large file size initially for MDFs and NDFs
5. Instant File Initialization

• Indexes and related tasks:

1. Covered Indexes
2. Separate nCI and CI
3. Online index rebuild
4. Filtered Indexes
5. Indexed Views (Automatic Query Substitution)
6. Fill Factor and Pad Index
7. Update Stats regularly

• Disks:

1. Disk Partition Alignment
2. Separate disks for os/binaries, sysDB, TempDB, MDF, LDF and BAK file locations
3. RAIO 10

• Maintenance:

1. Stripe Backup
2. SET PAGE_VERIFY CHECKSUM + BACKUP with CHECKSUM + RESTORE VERIFYONLY WITH CHECKSUM
3. DBCC CHECKDB Optimization
4. Archiving

Hope this helps,

_SqlTimes