Admitting that they were a bit late in upgrading their storage infrastructure, Rogelio Tayamora, IT director at Pepsi-Cola Products Philippines Inc., said that they waited for the right time when they would "really need it."

"The time came early this year when I hit 99 percent of my Oracle utilization," he said, referring to the Oracle Corp. applications that the company is running that includes Oracle Financials, Oracle Data Mining (ODM), and Oracle's Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution.

"We felt the impact on our monthly closing process so we made a decision to augment our existing storage system," Tayamora said. Prior to migration to the Sun StorageTek 6140, Pepsi was using Sun Fire v880 and Sun Fire v440 servers.

According to Tayamora, the acquisition of a new storage server was already in the company's plans since last year. It was only in the second quarter of this year, however, when the company's IT department seriously began talking about upgrading storage when the company was on the heels of another Oracle implementation.

The department's storage utilization monitoring system identified a need to upgrade because of the growing distribution and number of users.