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Disk i/o is almost always the most important factor
There are too many variables for there to be one set of standard recommendations. IBM stopped supporting the NotesBench effort several years ago, and I think it was because it took huge efforts to produce results for just a small set of workloads and configurations, and customers found that these results really weren't all that helpful.
But here's one general rule: no matter what your workload is, you will always want the fastest disk i/o subsystem that you can afford in your budget. Memory and CPU are almost always secondary issues. If you can find any of the old NotesBench reports, you'll see that they handled thousands, and sometimes tens of thousands of users (with multiple partitions running), with CPUs with modest capabilities compared to what's out today, and with surprisingly little RAM. Here's an example of a benchmark from 9 years ago that supported a simulated workload of 26,000 mail users on a single server with just 4 CPUs and 8 GB of RAM: http://h71019.www7.hp.com/ActiveAnswers/downloads/FINAL%20HP%20ProLiant%20DL585%20Opteron%20Audit%207-39-04.pdf But notice that the server had three RAID controllers connected to six external disk storage units, containing a total of 78 disks!
Of course, if you're doing more than email and simple Notes client applications, CPU and RAM do become somewhat more important. Running additional server tasks, using iNotes and a lot of web applications, and running heavy backround agent workloads will all push up your memory and CPU requirements -- potentially by a lot, but maybe not quite as much as you might think. Domino uses a lot of shared memory and even on a 64 bit OS a lot of the server internals don't take as much advantage of the the available address space as they could.
Here's an example of one suggested storage architecture: http://www.wissel.net/blog/d6plinks/SHWL-7RB3P5 And BTW, if you can afford a subsystem that uses SSD drives, go for it. All reports I've heard so far are that it is a big, big win for Domino server performance.
-rich
Feedback response number WEBB98RSHP created by ~Ned Nimfanakonyoopsi on 06/17/2013
Disk i/o is almost always the most important factor
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. . Disk i/o is almost always the most ... (~Ned Nimfanakon... 17.Jun.13) 
