This document discusses reasons to upgrade from earlier versions of SQL Server to SQL Server 2012. Some key reasons include that SQL Server 2012 provides a single solution for high availability and disaster recovery needs, allows automatic failover without extra hardware, enables related databases to failover together, makes application failover nearly transparent, and utilizes standby servers more effectively for tasks like reporting and backups. SQL Server 2012 also offers improvements like supporting up to four database replicas with synchronous or asynchronous configuration, avoiding orphaned users through contained databases, improved memory architecture, and built-in capabilities for encryption, compression, and automatic statistics updates on secondary replicas.