In a scenario with a database containing hundreds of millions of rows and reaching sizes of 500GB with maybe ~20 users. Mostly it's data storage for aggregated data to be reported on later.
Would SQL Azure be able to handle this scenario? If so, does it make sense to go that route? Compared to purchasing and housing 2+ high end servers ($15k-$20k each) in a co-location facility + all maintenance and backups.
I don't know whether SQL Azure is able to handle your scenario - 500GB seems a lot and does not figure in the pricing list (50GB max). I'm just trying to give perspective about the pricing.
Official pricing of SQL Azure is around 10$ a GB/month ( http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/pricing/)
Therefore, 500 GB would be around 5k $ each month roughly. 2 high-end servers (without license fees, maintenance and backups) of 20k take about 8 months to pay off.
Or, from an other point of view: Assuming you change your servers every 4 years, does the budget of 240k $ (5k $ * 48 months) cover the hardware, installation/configuration, licence fees and maintenance costs? (Not counting bandwidth and backup since you'll pay that extra too when using SQL Azure).