SQL Server – Transactional Replication Data During Rebuild

Currently I am running my business on 2x SQL servers which have 38 GB of ram at all

As well as the replication strategy to improve availability the though the replica taking over if the primary fails, you must factor in a god backup strategy - in what follows I'm going to assume that you already have this (if not, you need to factor it into your costings and a really good backup solution for your business critical data is not something you should try buy/create cheaply).

If you are happy with this arrangement in terms of resilience and general performance, and you are just upgrading the servers mainly to replace old hardware, then go with option 1 and upgrade the current design. Remember that if you build a different infrastructure you may run into problems you've never seen before and if you do they may turn up at the least convenient time for your business. If you don't have the knowledge/experience to fix things fast (and it isn't available in anyone else in the company you can call on) this could be very expensive in terms of business lost due to downtime and paying an expert to fly in and help.

Do I need SSDs beside plenty of RAM

That very much depends on your applications write patterns. Given you have ~80Gb of data you might find all your common working set could be held in RAM most of the time so for read heavy loads you will see little or no difference between the SSDs and spinning metal for day-to-day operations as the drives won't be touched for most reads. That data held in memory will be lost in some circumstances (such as when SQL server is shut down for what-ever reason) and it will take a while for the working set to get loaded and at this point the SSDs will help quite noticeably. For writes data will still of course need to hit the disk, so for write heavy loads the SSDs will help.

Do remember that Standard Edition will only use up to 64Gb of memory per instance (see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc645993.aspx#CrossBoxScale) so you may not see all that 96Gb get used in either box.

I now have 1 main database (80GB-DATA and 20GB of SQL Server log)
I can have at TWO SQL servers 8 X 250 GB ssd SATA disc
or HP storage with 10~14 pieces of 600GB 10K SAS disc in storage

Am I reading this wrong, or are you expecting your data size to increase a fair bit over the active service life of the new hardware? In RAID10 those SSDs will give you ~1TB of space which is considerably bigger than the ~100Gb you are using now, and that large collection of spinning metal even more so (3Tb+ unless you configure a redundancy level over 2:1), so you might be over-spending here for your near-/mid-term needs.

By default, replication will push out the following DDL changes to subscribers:

• ALTER TABLE
• ALTER VIEW
• ALTER PROCEDURE
• ALTER FUNCTION
• ALTER TRIGGER

And by default, I mean unless you have specified otherwise when you made a call to sp_addpublication when setting up the publication (even if done through the GUI, this is the underlying stored procedure that is called). There is a parameter for that stored procedure, @replicate_ddl, that is set to 1 by default, meaning that the above DDL commands will replicate to subscribers for the articles in the publication.

When you made your initial call to sp_addarticle, you would have specified (again, even if through the GUI where all the article options are set) which indexes (clustered and nonclustered) were generated for subscribers to create for initialization as well.

Reference :: How to: Replicate Schema Changes