Thanks for your replies guys aschmitt, that's interesting that you found the performance increase shocking, our network is 2500+ nodes so hopefully those increases will be visible to us too! I don't think you guys really understood what I was saying. We are going to be performing a hardware upgrade regardless, what I wanted to ask was would I....
a. be better off upgrading NPM and all components on present (old hardware), get it running well and then migrate the whole upgraded software system to new hardware or...
b. migrate existing Solarwinds set up to new hardware inits present state and then perform software upgrades when Solarwinds is running on new hardware?
Thanks for the input guys