That sounds bogus. A 100 TiB Oracle database is doable but incredibly expensive. 1 TiB with the appropriate redundancy will cost you around 10,000 € if you go Oracle. Perhaps you can get a good discount if you order a large cluster right away. So we're looking at 1,000,000 € just for disks here.
Then you would have to pay for the CPUs, the licenses and the consulting (lots of it, tuning a 100 TiB system is a huge task). Add another million or two...
How much would it cost with a NoSQL solution? Don't want to turn this answer into self promotion, but I'm confident it's well under the million with better performance (assuming you don't need a relational database).
They probably give you volume discounts, you know. And would a 150 machine NoSQL cluster really compare so favorably? An enterprise-grade server with an array of 10k-15k RPM drives or SSD's and appropriate redundancy is not going to be cheap.
What about the cost of manpower to operate one vs. the other? If you can hire one novice sysadmin @ $40k, labor costs will be small, but for a 150-machine cluster you aren't going to get far with a $40k novice.
The price I gave you is what one of our customers pay, after negotiation. True, they didn't order for 100 TiB.
In 2011, you don't need 150 nodes to build a 100 TiB system.
Don't take this as an official estimate, but I think we would advise on 7200 drives and more RAM and it would probably end up with a system one (several?) order(s) of magnitude faster than what you would get with a regular RDBMS.
Good luck with that. At $100 per 8GB of ECC RAM, that's $1mil in RAM, and with 4-slot machines you'll need 3,200 boxes. 1,600 boxes if you go for dual-CPU machines with 8-slot.
First, 8GB ECC sticks are actually a bit under $100... retail. You're not going to buy almost 13,000 sticks of RAM retail, are you?
Second, server motherboards are not limited to a mere 8 slots. 16's are widely available, even 32's can be found at retail, and there are more options out there than what Newegg or whatever you're shopping at has.
Then you would have to pay for the CPUs, the licenses and the consulting (lots of it, tuning a 100 TiB system is a huge task). Add another million or two...
How much would it cost with a NoSQL solution? Don't want to turn this answer into self promotion, but I'm confident it's well under the million with better performance (assuming you don't need a relational database).