In a project that began in 1999, Little Rock, Ark.-based Acxiom built its own 6,000-node grid, with two processors per node, using software developed in-house to meet the information management and time-to-market needs of Acxiom and its clients. The infrastructure is also used to host an analytics service and supports a reference base of 20 billion records and two petabytes of company and customer data.

'We've been evaluating grid software for some time and found Acxiom's grid solution to be by far the most advanced. Together, Acxiom and EMC will provide customers with the industry's most complete, grid-based information infrastructure for information-intensive applications,' said Jeff Nick, EMC's chief technology officer.

Acxiom will continue to have access to the information grid software to use in its business.