Microsoft has posted a white paper that discusses how to physically partition your hardware in order to optimize read-write vs read only workloads on your transactional system.
Why is this important? Well, there are certain ERP vendors who claim that any access to their data outside of what they explicitly support (or certify) compromises their solution and invalidates their support agreements. Their logic, not without some merit, claims that even read-only processes can potentially place a lock on the database or tables or rows which can cause a total meltdown and, potentially, lead to the end of the world as we know it.
AlwaysOn has been certified by many such vendors which allows companies to have a dedicated server to handle all of the OLTP workloads and another server to handle the read only workloads without putting the ERP at risk. AlwaysOn simply makes sure that the Reporting server is in sync with the OLTP one.
The read is a bit dry but paints a pretty good picture of what the potential solution may look like.
business intelligist 