Microsoft just released an interesting press release:  Microsoft Closes Acquisition of DATAllegro

The important stuff from this press release:

Microsoft will offer a new solution based on DATAllegro’s technology that extends Microsoft SQL Server to scale into hundreds of terabytes of data. The company will begin giving customers and partners early access to the combined solution through community technology previews (CTPs) within the next 12 months, with full product availability scheduled for the first half of calendar year 2010.

Some info from their website: DATAllegro v3 performs table scans between 0.5TB/minute and 10.5TB/minute. DATAllegro v3 offers new capabilities to handle complex workloads that are a mixture of near real-time loads, long analytical queries and short quick-hit queries. Improved workload management gives queries with low workloads higher priority, reducing the overall workload on the server. DATAllegro also provides a comprehensive architecture with a high-speed loader performing loads at rate of over 1TB/hour. The loading server or landing zone within the high-speed appliance network is used to provide a loading services with a minimal impact to queries being run.

You can read more about DATAllegro here http://www.datallegro.com/v3/index.asp