Having fast hardware and storage throughput is also part of our strategy as many others have also suggested. We also use a separate dedicated web server and also try not to overload the platform system by offloading more polling to dedicated polling engines. Syslog and traps can also kill your system, I am sure to keep a close eye on how both the syslog/trap rules and capacity are impacting my system.
We are running our entire architecture on Windows Server 2008 R2 in a completely virtualized environment (VMWare) with a SQL Server 2008 R2 using MS Failover Clustering. Within the next month we will be moving the database to a dedicated system with a 1.5 TB Solid State RAID array but still virtualized for the flexibility.
