[dba-SQLServer] Outlandish Pricing?

This snip (from http://www.byteandswitch.com/document.asp?doc_id=116900&WT.svl=news1_3)

Philipines-based wireless service Smart Communications has deployed the appliance to trawl data on its 22 million subscribers and run checks on fraud and billing information. (See Smart Signs Greenplum.) Pricing for Sun's Data Warehouse Appliance starts at around $22,000 per Tbyte for a 20-Tbyte configuration.

I am working via a colleague with a small client who has 62M rows in one table in his database. Copy it once and he is past the 1TB boundary. According to the above, you cannot buy this in chunks smaller than 20TB, which translates to $440,000 per installation. Just what Mom 'n' Pop needs!
 
Arthur Fuller
Technical Writer, Data Modeler, SQL Sensei
www.artfulsoftware.com