Several storage vendors also were considered as well but Pepsi decided to choose Sun StorageTek because Sun provided the "end-to-end support" that the company needs. The deal was finalized through Sun Microsystems' local elite partner, InfoStorage, which was the local distributor of Storagetek before the latter was acquired by Sun last year.

"Infostorage complements Sun a lot, that's why they are our only elite partner in the country," said Anthony Agustin Jr., storage manager for Sun Microsystems' sales and pre-sales division.

According to Agustin, the Sun StorageTek 6140 scales up to 16 disk drives per tray with up to six expansion trays, and supports up to 112 disks and 56 terabytes, offers four or eight 4Gigabit Fibre Channel ports, allowing companies to start small and add storage 'non-disruptively and only when they need it."

"One feature we like is the ability to take out the disk and take it to another location with minimum downtime," said Tayamora.

"Pepsi will (most likely) use StorageTek to connect to all servers directly or via SAN (storage area network) and, eventually, buy another system and do DR (disaster recovery) by way of replication," said Agustin.