Our Goals and Requirements

Reliability (uptime)
We're 24x7x365
Our users never sleep! (Neither do I)
Scalability
Queries/Second is doubling every few months!
Volume of data growing nearly as fast
Redundancy
Multiple Machines
Multiple Locations
Restartable Processing
Ease of Use
We don't want to have to train engineers as DBAs
DBA's shouldn't be full-time
Ease of Maintenance
We like things we can customize
We like simple repair/recovery procedures