My company has a couple applications running on a SQL Server 2008 R2 back end that has always been a bit of a dog. It does a lot of work, and performance is an issue. Up till now we just accepted the performance. Recently, I was asked to see if there was anything we could do. Being a sysadmin, my first inclination is to throw more hardware at it — more CPU, more memory. But I want to make sure that the hardware we have is being correctly utilized first — tuned to perfection. I know this is an art. The system is pretty out-of-the-box and the application vendor isn't into tweaking our server.
I have run performance metrics, but I'm no DBA. It's pretty Greek to me. Are there companies that do this kind of tuning for you? Any quick and simple things to check? Where do I begin?