Optimal Hardware for > 30K Requests / min?
500 inserts per second is definitely into the area where out-of-the-box MySQL begins to have trouble.

Some things to do:


Don't trust benchmarks; use your code.
Combine one-row INSERTs into transactions.  (Much of what is limiting you to 500qps is the transaction overhead.
"Batch" inserts -- 100-1000 rows per INSERT statement gives you 10x performance improvement.
Use LOAD DATA -- also 10x (maybe more).
Switch to SSDs -- perhaps 10x faster than spinning drives.
innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit=2 -- much faster, but less secure in a crash.
Decrease the number of indexes, especially UNIQUE, on the table.
Do not use UUIDs.
Gather data some other way (eg, MyISAM table with no indexes), then batch INSERT...SELECT....  This has the added advantage of giving you a change to efficiently do ETL transformations.
My High Speed Ingestion technique.  It involves ping-ponging between two staging tables and handles various variations (multiple connections, etc)