SQL Server to run 270TB Multi-node Data Warehouse

Computerworld are reporting that Microsoft are working on a massive data warehousing project for an external client, in an obvious aim to dispel the idea that SQL Server is a lightweight platform. From the article:

At the annual conference of the Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS) user group, Microsoft said it is designing a 270TB multinode data warehouse for a foreign (ie. non-US) government that it declined to identify. The software vendor is also working on a 162TB single-node installation for its own marketing department.

Of course, this doesn't explain how Microsoft are doing this (any tweaks under the hood?), or whether the warehouse itself will be of any use (no metrics on reporting, data mining, etc. throughput - and we all know how Microsoft are on benchmarking *wink*). Still, I quite like SQL Server (and the MS BI tool suite) as a product, and it has singlehandedly been responsible for the biggest shakeup in the BI industry in the past several decades (a much needed one at that). If this kind of data volume can be handled well by SQL Server 2005, as configured by your average corporate DBA, then Oracle and IBM are really going to be looking over their shoulders.